W. R. Benedict. 



"S^cixs Studies 



• • • m 



^he H^atitudes and 
W>he lEcord's draper 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

©^Hp. Sup^rigl^i l^uX-X 

Shelf 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



New Studies 



. . IN . . 



The Beatitudes and 

Tiie Lord's Prayer, 



#A* ♦*< *M r^ 




I.KCTURKS DEl^IvmED BY 

PROFESSOR W. Ry'^BENEDICT, 

At the University of Cincinnati, during the Winter of 
1893-1894. 



^ 



3 






COPYRIGHTED, 1894. 



The Library 

,,, Congress 



VASHllSaTON 



'/i-:^|y/:N keeping with the will of Charles McMicken, the 
\V«^. founder of the University of Cincinnati, the Protestant 

version of the Bible has been used as a book of 
instruction in the institiition since the year 1880. 

Attendance on the Bible study has' been voluntary, and the 
hour at which it was held was declared vacant of other uni- 
versity exercises. 

It nia}^ interest the friends of the Bible and of the univer- 
sity to know that large numbers of students have availed 
themselves of the opportunity offered for a serious and 
reverent consideration of religious teaching as presented in 
the Scriptures. 

During the Winter of 1893- 1894 this Bible study was opened 
to the public, and many citizens attended the instruction 
throughout its entire course, the class itself numbering over 
seventy students. 

At the special request of these students, and by their gen- 
erous aid, as well as that of many friends of the institution, 
the lectures on the Beatitudes and the lyord's Prayer are now 
presented in more permanent form. 

Since publication was not contemplated when these lectures 
w^ere written, it is hoped that their personal and somewhat 
familiar manner of address will be pardoned. 

W. R. Benedict. 



INTRODUCTORY. 




^EASON should be used in the study of all 
subjects whatsoever. During years of ser- 
vice as instructor I have come in contact 
with hundreds of students, and the constitu- 
tion of my classes assures me that had reason been 
denied her rights I would have been left with the 
benches. I have urged the exercise of reason, have 
pled for it and labored for it without ceasing, therefore 
I hesitate not to say that there are better things than 
reason. 

The glory of man is not his reason, but his feeling. 
It is better to love and worship and pray than to 
reason, it is better to pity than to syllogize, to be 
sincere than to think. 

Consider the application. 

Religion, the religion of the Bible, of the Sermon on 
the Mount, is concerned primarily with these better 
things than reason. The Bible enjoins love to God 
and man as our supreme duty — love is a feeling. The 
Sermon speaks of hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness, of mercy, of peace; these also are feelings. 

If the Bible and reason conflict, which should go to 
the wall? How ought this question to be answered 
by one who continually advocates the use of reason, 



and at the same time believes there are truths higher 
than those of reason? Should not the answer be " Seek 
first the Kingdom of God," be not chiefly concerned 
to find inconsistencies and irrationalities in the Bible, 
search, rather, for those religious truths which ma}^ be 
found from the pra3xr of Moses to the last chapter of 
Revelation. If there be one subject more than another 
in the study of which it becomes the student to know 
that his reason is the right reason, that subject is 
religion. It is not far from an audacious thing for a 
student to assert that his reason crowds the Bible to 
the wall. There is a further and serious consideration. 

For manj^ persons, especiall}" in their earlier 3^ears, 
the Bible means onl}^ certain views of inspiration, of 
atonement, of justification b}^ faith. Bid them push 
the Bible to the wall at the command of reason, and 
they will turn away forever from the noblest truths in 
the possession of man ; they will cease to pray, and 
remain disciples of a dreary and lifeless culture. Let 
a young man or young woman desire first of all the 
Kingdom of God — that is, the reign of one whose 
authority rests on His excellence alone — and the 
logical fallac}^ will never be committed of taking a 
part for the whole, or of confounding religion with 
dogma. 

Is it not true that the best thing about a human 
being 'v^, justified feeling? Such feeling leads to action, 
and so does good continually. Justified feeling is 
produced by facts, and facts are secured by search, by 
intellectual endeavor, by the use of reason. Does not 
this place all in the hands of reason ? No, and in no 

6 



sense. It gives to reason its proper and subordinate 
place as the ser\^ant of feeling, whose duty it is to 
work always in the higher cause of love, purit}', 
righteousness, peace. 

In our present Bible studies there is need of a double 
charity. We will suppose that 3'our neighbor believes 
in the literal, verbal inspiration of the Bible, while you 
consider this an extreme and untenable view. Further, 
we will suppose that, by pressing 3'our liberalism upon 
him, 3^ou cause him to go astra}-. You regard 3'ourself 
as the more enlightened nature of the two ; is not 3"our 
dutj^ plain? Let us suppose, on the other hand, that 
your neighbor is "a liberal" and that 3'ou recognize 
in him a sincere, conscientious man. He does not 
accept the inspiration of the Bible, he does not believe 
in the Kingdom of Heaven or in the existence of God. 
Will 3'ou respect him in his unbelief as he shall respect 
3^ou in 3^our belief? Whether we please or no, this 
method of a double charit3^ is forced upon us all. 

Christian parents of fift3^ 3^ears of age have children 
in colleges and universities who are confronted with 
ideas and with facts to support them that were no 
where to be found when these parents attended school. 
Magazine literature has increased be3'ond estimate in 
the last twent3'-five 3'ears, and this literature is filled 
with the new facts and instinct with the modern 
method. From these facts and this method, 3^oung 
men and women can not be excluded. Not onh' so, 
students of both sexes in our higher institutions of 
learning, students who have left devouth^ religious 
homes, treat the Bible as an uninspired book, as a book 



with purely human origin and histor}^ They find in 
it statements that seem to them incredible, and the}^ 
reject these statements ; they find what they regard as 
inconsistencies in the record, and reject the record. 
What are those to do who believe that there is saving, 
religious, truth in the Bible ? What are they to do who 
believe the Bible is the articulate, syllabled, voice of 
God to men. 

Shall they say to these students you are of a repro- 
bate mind ; your hearts are being hardened against the 
day of wrath ; 3- ou must believe or be damned ? But 
some of these young men and women are sincere — 
sincere to the core — the}^ will believe if the}^ can, and 
they will not if they can not. Has the christian relig- 
ion nothing to offer but the doctrine of inspiration — 
the doctrine of atonement — the doctrine of justifica- 
tion by faith. Observe, I am not calling one of these 
doctrines in question, neither am I asking a believer in 
them to abandon one iota of what he considers their 
divine reality. I am saying, my friend — oh, ni}^ 
friend — there is more in religion than 3^ou know. 
Have the courage of your faith. Come out from the 
creed to the living reality which gave that creed its 
form. Do 3^ou believe in God? Of what, then, are j^ou 
afraid? Are there no facts with which to meet the sin- 
cere young men and women who will have a standing- 
ground in their own experience for whatever faith 
shall at any time come to be in them ? 

But I have asked a double charit}^ I have asked 
the "liberal" to be liberal and the skeptic to be a 
man — a man, for he who loves to be a skeptic is either 



fool or devil. Let the skeptic, therefore, say: "I am 
what I am, in spite of myself. I would I could believe 
this world to be God's world — the world of a hoi}-, 
loving intelligence. Intelligence, holiness, love are 
higher than the forces of matter. This is a better 
world, regarded as God's world than regarded as the 
world of brute force. I have not outgrown the 
grandeur and the beauty of the idea of God. I am not 
ashamed of that idea. I know that the deepest things 
within me are my affections, and that no affection is as 
deep as the affection for a holy intelligence. I will 
pledge you the charity of a true liberal in these bible- 
studies. I will put off my sneer; I will untwist the 
curl in my lip; I will bow down my soul before 
any truth, any reality you may have to show me." Is 
there a student in this University who dare not take 
such a position. Is there a student in this Universit}- 
who has committed himself so often to the statement 
that the Bible is outgrown and religion a sham, that 
he dare not, dare not, I say, use his reason with me in 
studying the words of the Bible. God forbid, or all 
true beings forbid, if you have no God. For these 
reasons I entreat all my hearers, as sincere searchers 
after truth, to determine with me whether there are 
any facts in our daily experience which confirm the 
Bible utterances we are to examine. 

There are many questions connected wath a detailed 
study of the Sermon on the Mount, which, though 
interesting and instructive, I put entirely aside for 
matters of larger importance. I will illustrate ni}^ 
meaning. The beginning of this discourse is as fol- 

9 



lows: "And, seeing the multitudes, He went up into 
the mountain." I might call your attention to the 
Greek here, ^fs" to opo^^ and emphasize the signifi- 
cance of the article -<^' into f/ie mountain, that is, a 
mountain in the neighborhood, or a mountain well 
known, from the fact of this discourse having been 
delivered upon it. I might say to you that one of the 
commentators has gotten out of the word opo?^ 
mountain, the picturesque fact that Matthew wished to 
place this Sermon on the Mount in contrast with the 
Decalogue sermon on Mt. Sinai. 

A part of the second verse of our chapter reads : 
"And He opened His mouth and taught them" — 
" d voi^a^ TO <it6p.ay I might quote Luther, and say 
that this phrase, " He opened His mouth," was designed 
to show the earnestness, seriousness of the speaker. 
As lyUther says: "It is the duty of every preacher 
that he should open his mouth — not be silent, not 
mumble, but out with it — hit whom he may." I 
might occupy ver^^ much time in comparing Luke's 
more fragmentary account of this discourse with the 
account given by Matthew, and thereby spend further 
effort on this word mountain. I might call your atten- 
tion to the tradition which has chosen the hill known 
as the Horns of Hattin, two horn-like heights, rising 
sixty feet above the plain between them — two hours 
west of Tiberias. I might quote Dean Stanley in favor 
of this tradition (Sinai and Palestine, 360), or I might 
quote Paulus as in favor of a hill near Safed, or I 
might reconcile Luke, who says that Jesus, before 
speaking, came down wdth His disciples and stood on 

10 



a level place, with Matthew, who says that He went up 
into a mountain and sat down. I might, I say, recon- 
cile these tremendous discrepancies by saying, wath 
Bengel, that on the mountain, a lower one than that 
on which Jesus had been previously, there was a 
plateau or level place, so that He could be in a 
mountain and on a level place at the same time. 

The entire Sermon on the Mount is susceptible of 
this treatment. Consider the number of commenta- 
tors who have written on the New Testament ; con- 
sider also that each one of these commentators is 
under contract to do " original work," and I think you 
will see that disagreement is likely to prevail, and that 
each student will put that commentary under his arm 
which most harmonizes with his preconceived opinion 
or his unconscious leanings. 

I put aside two other matters also in our study of 
this discourse — and they are, first, an attempt to know 
exactly what was in the mind of Christ as He spoke 
these words ; and, second, all estimate of the sermon 
as Jewish, as pre-Christian. If you wish to know 
exactly what Jesus meant, read the commentators — 
one will tell you He meant exactly this ; the other, that 
He meant exactly the opposite. 

It is not my purpose to examine the views of those 
who maintain that all Jesus contemplated by the 
sermon was to spiritualize the Mosaic Law, that He 
was gradually forced by His disciples and servants to 
put Himself forward as the Messiah, that the distinctive 
doctrines of the church, such as the atonement, justifica- 
tion by faith, election, came at a later time through 

11 



Paul. One thing seems clear — the Sermon on the 
Mount has meant less to the Christian world than it 
ought to have meant, and it is justly said that this is 
chief!}' due to the absence in the sermon of those doc- 
trines named above. 

Let us put to the Christian world this question: 
Have 3'ou an}- other object in view than the salvation 
of men ; the rescue of men from their sins ? Do 3'ou 
not believe and teach that for this end Jesus Christ 
lived and died? Do 3'ou not believe and teach that sal- 
vation means the becoming better on the part of the 
sinner, that salvation is the restoration of man to God- 
likeness ? Do 3'ou believe or teach that God can take 
the vile to Himself? Do 3-ou not believe and teach 
that a man must be regenerate, a new man, before God 
can receive him ? These are the professed beliefs of 
Christendom, and they will serve to make plain what 
it is that we now seek from the Sermon on the Mount. 
Are there realities in this sermon, which, like the heard 
voice of God, will help us to become better — not more 
learned, not more reputed — but better? 

You will readih' gather from what has been said 
that we propose to do an audacious thing, viz., to 
step aside from the commentaries and state what 
we find and do not find in this discourse, as it lies 
before us in the gospel of IMatthew. And, first, 
looking at the discourse as a whole, we see that it 
presents the blessings and the duties belonging to all 
citizens of the kingdom of heaven. We find that the 
atmosphere of the discourse is what may be called con- 
soling, enlivening, inviting — that it is breathed around 

12 



the disciples of Christ, that it carries with it an invita- 
tion to all to enter this discipleship. We find then 
two central ideas in the Sermon on the Mount — the 
blessings and the duties of heavenly citizens. It 
should be remarked that those theologians or others, 
who, believing this sermon to be the word of God, 
separate it from Christianity as belonging to the old 
Jewish dispensation, are making a most fatal mistake. 
Either there is a kingdom of heaven or there is not — 
either the citizens of this kingdom are such as Christ 
declares them in this sermon, or they are not. If they 
are, then what is called Christianity has no other 
design than to make such heavenly citizens. It all 
comes back to this — do we believe the Old Testa- 
ment to contain the word of God, the law of God? 
Do we believe that if men had kept this law in spirit 
as in letter, they would have needed no Savior? If so, 
this Sermon on the Mount, as a spiritualizing of God's 
I^aw, is a true presentation of the blessings and duties 
of heavenly citizenship ; and the death of Christ, with 
all the doctrines thereunto attaching, have no other 
purpose than to make men into such characters as 
belong necessarily to citizens of the kingdom of heaven. 
It follows that a Christian man to-day, in this city, in 
this room, who professes himself saved by the blood 
of Christ from everlasting death, should compare his 
daily life with the life of the heavenly citizens, as 
depicted in this sermon, that he may learn whether he 
is being saved. 

The Sermon on the Mount, as we have said, presents 
the blessings and the duties belonging to all citizens of 
the heavenly kingdom. 

13 



Now, it would doubtless be claimed by many that this 
discourse is the inspired word of God, and that there- 
fore we are to believe in the existence of a kingdom of 
heaven and prepare for it accordingly. 

On the other hand, many might invite us to con- 
sider what modern biblical scholarship has to say 
respecting the development of the idea of a heavenly 
kingdom among the Jewish people. What is regarded 
as evidence might be submitted, tending to show that 
this people, in its beginnings, was entirely without the 
lofty spiritual conceptions which it subsequently dis- 
played, and which made it forever a marked and 
separate people. 

Further, the views of those sincere students might 
be considered who believe the}" find in the recorded 
life of Christ indications that his own conception 
changed, passing from a narrower, more literal, idea of 
a Messianic kingdom to a somewhat larger view — a 
view afterward further broadened b}^ Paul, transform- 
ing the Jewish religion into a world religion. In this 
immediate connection it were possible to compare the 
central ideas of world religions, and to point out in 
what respects the Christian idea seems a later and 
higher form of the religious consciousness. 

These possible lines of inquiry are named for the 
purpose of making more clear, by contrast, the exact 
purpose of our present study. 

We seek to test certain Bible statements by facts of 
our experience, and the immediate inquiry, therefore, 
is, are there any facts which point to a kingdom of 
heaven as the religious solution of the mystery of 

14 



existence. If we find such facts we shall have little 
difficulty in seeing that Christ's portraiture of the 
heavenly citizen is abidingly correct. 

Consider the following fact : We exist and we are 
finite. We live and are limited. Earthly life is 
experimentally, for most human beings, a very imper- 
fect and unsatisfactory affair. Theoretically, this 
earthly life is for many thinkers a suffering imperfec- 
tion that ends at the grave. It is to be admitted that 
a limited, suffering, existence does not seem a promis- 
ing fact from which to reach God and a heavenly 
kingdom. 

Yet this fact is, I doubt not, a chief source of the 
idea of the infinite which we find within us. If the 
finite were enough we should never have had the idea 
of the infinite. The finite as finite, because finite, 
suggests the infinite. Note a second fact: We are 
finite beings conscious of the infinite. I am glad to 
say that this second fact is not disputed by any one, 
however differently the fact be interpreted. Imper- 
fection suggests perfection — the limited — an un- 
limited — a fragmentary development through pain a 
progressive development without pain. Earth sug- 
gests heaven. Respecting the value of this fact I 
shall speak later. I am now concerned to point it out 
and at the same time to show how it has been naturally, 
yet utterly abused. Because the finite existence of 
man is so bad, so imperfect, so painful a thing, he 
regards the infinite as whatever the finite is not. 
Heaven is the direct opposite of earth; God the direct 
opposite of man ; eternity the opposite of time, the 

15 



kingdom of heaven a collection of negations. I say 
this is a natural outcome of so troubled and finite an 
existence as ours. Yet it would be difi&cult to 
find worse reasoning. Suppose a child who is learn- 
ing to walk and to speak were to conclude, from 
his tumbles and mistakes, respecting the estate of 
man, that it contained no walking and no speaking. 
This conception of the infinite as contra-finite, is one 
of the most serious misreasonings that has ever 
afiiicted the human mind. So far as Christianity is 
concerned, it has been the source of that unnatural, 
unmanl}^, presentation of Deity, which made atheists 
wherever it appeared. 

Return we to our fact, a finite troubled existence, a 
source of a consciousness of an infinite, untroubled 
existence. 

What is done with this fact in our day and genera- 
tion? It is brought under the grip of law, and 
thereby disposed of as an evolution. Ph3^sical science 
explains the consciousness of the infinite as it 
does ever>^thing else b}" matter and motion. The 
highest is explained bj^ the lowest ; the last by the 
first ; the rose by the roots. We hear constantly of 
the universal reign of causation — and upon inquiry 
this causation turns out to mean the finite causation of 
observed antecedent and consequent. I wish now to 
call attention to two matters of fact, that is of experi- 
ence, and to emphasize them fully. The first fact is that 
there are qualitative differences in this universe which 
thrust themselves upon us and persist in the face of all 
we can do to resolve them — these qualitative differ- 

16 



ences are called living matter or life, and consciousness. 
Now, what account could science give of the phe- 
nomena of biology if it confined itself to matter and 
motion? It is obliged to study the phenomena of life 
in living matter and organisms. There is absolutely 
no such thing as gaining the slightest conception of 
biological manifestations b}^ a study of matter and 
motion. You can not find the rationale of a human 
body by dissecting a corpse, you find it onl}- in the 
living, moving structure. What is true in biolog}^ is 
even more strikingly true in pS3xholog3^ or an account 
of consciousness. Ner\'e matter in motion is not con- 
sciousness and a million years examination of it as mov- 
ing would not disclose a single state of consciousness. 
Consciousness is known onh^ through consciousness, 
and understood onh' through consciousness. What 
does this mean ? it means that principles explanators' of 
the lower phenomena fail entireh^ when applied to the 
higher. And this carries with it the second fact above 
mentioned. We recognize a higher and a lower in the 
phenomena of the universe. Living matter is more than 
dead matter, and consciousness than either. Conscious- 
ness is the greatest reality' any where within the circle of 
our experience. Suspend 3^our consciousness and 
ever}' thing has ceased to be for 3'ou. Is it not for the 
sake of 3'our consciousness that }'ou do all j^ou do? 
Your plans and 3'our hopes ; your jo3'S and 3'our 
sorrows; 3'our trials; 3'our defeats and 3'our victories, 
what are the3'? Matter and motion? Are the3^ ex- 
plainable in terms of matter and motion, even though 
you know that without the movements of nerve matter 

17 



you would not have had them? Are the}^ accounted 
for by the brain ? Is not rather the brain accounted 
for by them? Are not the}^ the cause — the reason — 
the wherefore of the brain? To him who says 
the brain explains consciousness, let me reply not 
so ; consciousness explains the brain. Are we not 
reading the universe from the wrong end ? We think 
to explain the man by the child, and often we regret 
our inability to know the first consciousness. Would 
that vague, elementar\' state explain the man ; would 
the man be there or be seen to be there ; w^ould the 
slightest suspicion dawn upon us of the divine con- 
sciousness that should afterward appear? Where then 
is the explanation of man? Is it in those rudimentary 
organic sensations, whose only distinctions are hunger 
and thirst? No; it is in his reason, his conscience, 
his will. Go back to the beginning of these as finite 
appearances in finite time; trace the development 
itself. What explains it, the development or the devel- 
oped? You see the kind of reason for which our 
reason calls. The universe is a living, inter-blending 
whole. There are nowhere in it such separations as 
the scientist continually feigns and is obliged to feign, 
if he would study the small fragment which falls 
under his examination. When he studies matter in 
motion, he is purposel}^ leaving out of account the 
greater facts of life and consciousness. Contemplate a 
human being in his best estate. We have first of all 
that most wonderful affair, the human body with its 
multiplicit}^ of organs and parts working harmoniously 
to one physical end — the nourishment of the brain. 

18 



This brain well nourished is the occasion of a vigorous 
and well-balanced consciousness. Sensations are quick 
and clear, recollections prompt and reliable, thinking 
spontaneous, orderh' and just. What is the reason — 
the explanation of this human being? But there is 
more. His best estate has not been named. The 
body for the brain, the brain for consciousness and con- 
sciousness for conscience. This man at his best estate 
loves truth — is sincere, is pure. Now seek his mean- 
ing in this universe, and where is it to be found? In 
matter and motion? The grandest reality' we know b}^ 
sight or sound or inner consciousness is a man whole 
in body, true in mind and pure in heart." 

" Space comprehends and swallows me up like a 
point ; but b}' thought I comprehend it. Man is but 
a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a think- 
ing reed. It is not needful that the universe should 
arm itself to crush him. A breath of vapor, a drop of 
water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe 
were to crush him man would be more noble than that 
which slays him, because he knows that he dies." 

We have now to consider the opposing conclusions 
that are drawn from the facts previoush^ stated, and to 
approve or reject in keeping with our best reason. 

These conclusions divide into two great classes, the 
non-religious and the religious. There are thoughtful, 
earnest minds who, admitting the facts I have named, 
do not regard them as evidences of God or of a 
heavenh- kingdom. The chief reason for this conclu- 
sion is to be found in the method and the achievements 
of modern science. Science has proclaimed the uni- 

19 



versal reign of causation, and has then committed the 
serious mistake of supposing that this means the uni- 
versal reign of one kind of causation. What I now 
have to sa}^ respecting the method and conclusions of 
scientists, I say entireh^ on their authority- . 

Thej^ claim, and most justly, to have made advances 
by specialization. They have taken some one fragment 
of nature and put all their strength upon it, as though 
it were alone in the universe. This is simply what we 
find going on evers^where — division of labor. What- 
ever has been learned respecting the world in which 
we live, has been gained b}' dividing the army of 
searchers into small groups, and confining each group 
directl}^ to its own small territory. 

The advantage and the disadvantage, the gain and 
the loss of this method can not fail to be seen. The 
advantage is that 3'ou can take up one thing, as a nerve 
fiber or a nerve cell, and look at it alone. The gain is 
exactness and minuteness of knowledge. The disad- 
vantage is that that at which you look is torn out of 
its relations and dead. The loss is in missing the real, 
full meaning of the little particle 3'ou study. 

That w^hat I say is true appears beyond question, 
when we consider what has come to be the general 
conclusion of scientists, as expressed by the army of 
special workers. We are told that there are no 
miracles. Each student finds everywhere an un- 
broken regularity in the workings of those things 
he studies. The same yesterday, to-day and forever. 
And so there has come about an absolutely uncon- 
querable belief that there never has been and can 

20 



never be a break in nature's working. Jonah was not 
swallowed by a large fish, the dead were never raised. 
And here again, as I think, Christianity has failed to 
recognize its strenth or to use its most stupendous fact. 
Christianit}^ has been ready to stand or fall with the 
miracle of Jonah or the resurrection of Lazarus. 
Christianity has no need of those miracles, when there 
are greater ones taking place every hour of every day ; 
when existence, life, consciousness are wonders before 
which the resurrection of Lazarus is as nothing — 
wonders which this very same physical science of 
which I speak is making clearer every day. The more 
you know about the nerve cell and the nerve fiber, the 
more profoundly mysterious, miraculous does it become 
that they should be related to our consciousness. Con- 
sider these statements. It requires six hundred and 
sixty-seven billion vibrations of ether each second 
affecting the retina of the eye, and so exciting the 
brain cells to give you the color violet. At the com- 
mand of Christ, Lazarus, who had been three days dead, 
came forth from the tomb. Which miracle is the 
greater? But you say one is a fact, the other a 
miracle. Not so. They are both miracles. Science 
can explain the resurrection of Lazarus as easily 
as it can the miracle of violet. But you say Lazarus 
did not rise from the dead. That would have been 
contrary to natural law. Oh, pitiable weakness. The 
consciousness of color arose from the dead. The 
living glorious consciousness of violet arose from 
the dead vibrations of ether. And physical science 
has only made the rock-hewn tomb the clearer and 

21 



the grave clothes more apparent. The more we 
know, the more we touch the awful mystery of exist- 
ence. The child laughs and plays and understands it 
all. "How do I see?" "Why, I just open my eyes." 
"How do I hear?" "Why, I just listen." It is the 
man who knows who shudders before what he does 
not know. 

Let then each scientist write in large and iron letters 
over the door of his special laboratory the word law ; 
there will glow beneath it and through it more plain 
than ever the word miracle. But the scientists have 
not only forgotten that their word law is but a shorter 
and intenser way of spelling miracle, they have com- 
mitted a serious error of interpretation. They have 
explained the higher by the lower; they have not only 
said everything is caused, they have said ever^^thing is 
caused by matter and motion. And here come those 
in protest who draw a religious conclusion from the 
facts of our daily experience. That man, a finite 
creature, finds within himself the thought of an 
infinite, is because he is more than finite — that he 
thinks God is because he is in the image of God. 
Religion and a kingdom of heaven are the truest, 
most real explanations of this world and of man. I 
wish I could impart to you the fullness of their belief 
who draw the religious conclusion from the facts of 
our daily life. They look with pity, and sometimes I 
fear with contempt, upon students of this world who 
find, as its sole reason, cause, solution — blind mechan- 
ism. They see all things in God because they find 
within themselves life consciousness and duty. No 



chemical anal^^sis of the soil, no microscopic examina- 
tion of the roots explains the plant. The flower 
explains the plant. Man is not explained by the 
anatomy or physiology of his body or the workings of 
his brain, but by his aspirations, his love, his resolute 
will. These men of whom I speak read the world from 
above — not from below^ and wh}^ are they not right ? 
They are right, or there is no reason in the universe or 
for the universe. It should be carefully noted that 
those who conclude in this wise from the facts of life 
do not conclude to a negative or empty religion. Their 
infinite being is not the opposite of man — their heaven 
not the opposite of earth. Turn this world — this 
present so-called finite world into a kingdom of 
heaven — and who would wish to leave it ? And this 
very present world would become a heavenly kingdom 
if we were heavenly citizens. 

I have endeavored to show that a kingdom of heaven 
best explains the kingdom of earth — that the finite 
has its presupposition and reason in the infinite that 
man is best understood through God. You will have 
recognized, running through all my presentation, the 
conception of the heavenl}- kingdom as a continuation 
of all we know^ to be best and highest in this earthly 
kingdom. I have selected the most significant facts 
in our experiences, and found their deepest meaning 
to be in their continuance, their ultimate triumph and 
their endless unfolding. I have sought to show that 
neither our religion nor our reason introduces a break 
or antagonism between the natural and the super- 
natural — earth and heaven — man and God. It is not 



possible for us to have a larger, more fruitful concep- 
tion than that of a kingdom of heaven — a kingdom 
where all are as they ought to be and all things work 
together for good. It is a delight to contemplate such 
a kingdom. I have seen persons stand before the 
Sistine Madonna as before a sacrament. I have 
known them to be refined and elevated by such con- 
templation. The kingdom of heaven is our divinest 
picture, and though any man believe or fear it will 
turn out but a picture of the imagination, let him con- 
template and adore it. He will be the happier and the 
better — and the time may come when the fact that 
he could conceive such a kingdom, and himself in part 
realize it from day to day, shall be the saving proof of 
its reality. 

What a blessing and refreshment to turn to the con- 
templation of the heavenly kingdom. It is like com- 
ing in from the night and the storm to the light and 
the peace of home. 

I have seen men, rude peasant men, remove their 
hats and bow their heads before the mother and the 
child in the beautiful room at Dresden. 

Would it not be well for us to come before the divine 
picture of a heavenly kingdom with uncovered heads? 
You feel my meaning. Put off self-seeking, jealousy, 
bitterness — the plannings and contrivings that keep us 
always in turmoil and distress. You know that it will 
do us good to leave behind these garments of our 
baser selves, and draw near the holiest thing we have 
on this earth, clothed only in the garb of penitence 
and of prayer. 

24 



There are eight beatitudes. Hear them : 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." 

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be 
comforted." 

" Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth." 

" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness, for they shall be filled." 

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain 
mercy." 

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." 

" Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be 
called the Sons of God." 

"Blessed are they that have been persecuted for 
righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." 

These sacred words fall into two groupings. The 
first four beatitudes announce the heavenly kingdom 
as the possession of certain souls, because they need it, 
and, as miserable, long for it. 

The second four announce the heavenly kingdom as 
belonging to these same souls, because of what they 
are in themselves, because of their character. 

Notice that the first and last beatitudes announce the 
blessing in the general words "kingdom of heaven" — 
the intervening beatitudes particularize this kingdom 
by naming the special blessings which it involves. 

And what shall we say of the word ''blessed'' w^hich 
begins each divine announcement? What is the 
reality in your experience and mine stated by the word 



blessedness? Blessedness I define as the feeling of 
joy which accompanies the knowledge that our best 
self is being realized. Such blessedness will consecrate 
suffering. The realization of our best self involves 
.ver}^ often a painful suppression of individual, momen- 
tary desires; yet we have a calm, immovable joy, amid 
the pain of suppression, from the certainty that our best 
self is being realized. In this wise do I distinguish 
blessedness from happiness and from pleasure? The 
joy of blessedness is the joy of progress, cost what it 
will. Such is the blessedness of the kingdom of 
heaven; our best selves are, in that kingdom, contin- 
uall}" realized. Return we to the beatitudes. 

There are notable omissions about them, especiall}^ 
if the kingdom of heaven be as I have presented 
it — an extension and enlargement of the kingdom of 
earth. 

In the first place, there is no blessedness for knowl- 
edge. 

In the second place, there is no blessedness for 
reputation. 

In the third place, there is no blessedness for power. 

In the fourth place, there is no blessedness for 
mone3\ Knowledge, reputation, power, money ; not 
a blessing for those things after which men and women 
and children strive day and night. There must be 
something the matter with the beatitudes, or something 
the matter with men and women and children. Blessed 
are the poor in spirit ; blessed are they that mourn ; 
blessed are the persecuted. What statements to make 
to men ! The first omission I have named seems the 

26 



most serious — that is to say, we are willing — in a 
pureh' theoretical wa^^ be it obser^'ed — to admit that 
the kingdom of heaven may possibly not mean money 
or reputation or power. It is quite fashionable at 
times to admit this, as you slip from 3-our costly car- 
riage to your costly pew in 3'our costly church before 
3^our costly minister, but to admit that the kingdom of 
heaven is not knowledge, really that seems too bad. 
Is it right — is it true that knowledge should be 
omitted from the blessings of heaven ? To this ques- 
tion I have no doubt that we should answer 3'es. 
Knowledge as knowledge could get on as comfortably 
in the center of hell as on the throne of God. God 
is not God because He is omniscient, but because He 
is all hol5\ 

" In vaiu have I amassed 
Within me all the treasures of man's mind, 
And when I pause and set me down at last 
No new power welling inwardly I find. 
A hair-breadth is not added to my height, 
I am no nearer to the infinite." 

Those words have laid the secret bare. Knowl- 
edge accumulated da}^ and night causes no new 
powers to well inwardh^ adds no hair-breadth to one's 
height. Consider the nature of knowledge and 3^ou 
will justify the poet's utterance. To be aware that 
there are two stoves in this room is knowledge; to be 
aware of Guizot's account of the Feudal system is 
knowledge; to be aware of the latest pronunciation is 
knowledge. I might illustrate indefinitely, but I have 
named enough instances to show that the only thing 



you can possibly get out of knowledge as knowledge is 
conceit. And thus it comes that persons of a false, a 
sham culture are conceited — nothing else. It is in 
this fact that we find justification for the growing com- 
plaint against modern education — naming it Godless 
and non-moral. For this reason Felix Adler has writ- 
ten his very suggestive book on the moral education 
of children, devising a scheme of moral teaching 
which should be introduced into our public schools, 
and so meet the lack we are all beginning to feel. 

If a new beatitude were to be written by some of 
our friends in the Bay State, it would, perhaps, read as 
follows : 

"Blessed are the}^ that are cultured, for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." 

Now, true culture is far and away more than knowl- 
edge. Matthew Arnold has well defined it when he 
said, "Culture is an acquaintance with the best that 
has been thought and written." Such acquaintance is 
wholly impossible, except for those who are pure in 
heart, poor in spirit, and who hunger and thirst after 
righteousness. Consider the Psalms and the Book of 
Job as among the best things in Old Testament lyitera- 
ture. How are you to become acquainted with them? 
By committing them to memory ? By learning all that 
modern biblical criticism has to say about them? Not 
so. A poor humble woman has begun the culture of 
her soul by the 23d Psalm. She has learned it? Oh, 
yes. She has not committed it to memory, she has 
learned it by heai't. " The I^ord is her Shepherd, she 
shall not want." 

28 



If Matthew Arnold were to have gathered within 
the covers of one book the best things that had been 
thought and written, could he have made the world 
acquainted with these things by sending a copy of the 
book to each inhabitant of earth? If there is one 
truth more than another which should at the present 
time be taught in all our higher institutions of learning, 
it is that the kingdom of heaven does not belong to 
those whose sham culture is a conceit of knowledge. 
I do not know a more pitiable sight than a college 
graduate ascending the so-called high places of earth 
without one qualification of the citizens of heaven. I 
am asking myself whether any one concludes from 
what I have said that I desire to announce a new 
beatitude as follows : 

" Blessed are the ignorant, for theirs is the kingdom 
of heaven." 

For me to do this, or for any one to do this, would 
be to turn my original sentence about in an altogether 
unjustifiable manner. 

All knowledge as such is non-religious, therefore all 
religion is without knowledge. It is incredible that 
rational creatures would criss-cross their reason after 
such fashion, but, alas, they do. Those who are pure in 
heart, who are poor in spirit, who hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, may safely acquire knowledge for 
ever and ever. The more they learn, the more their 
poverty of spirit, their purity of heart and their hunger 
and thirst after righteousness will be realized as their 
own best selves, as the basis of their character, the 
more they will be blessed. Let the rich man illustrate 

29 



my meaning. We never think of saying: "Blessed 
are the millionaires, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven," and this because we know, or hear of so many 
millionaires who are not poor in spirit, who do not 
hunger and thirst after righteousness, and who are not 
overmuch persecuted for righteousness sake. Sup- 
pose, from such obser^-ation, we were to conclude in 
this wise: " Cursed are the rich, for theirs is the king- 
dom of death." Certainly our conclusion would be 
wholly unwarranted. A heavenly citizen, though rich — 
that is possible — and consider his blessedness as with 
his money he does, day b}^ day, the work of a heavenly 
citizen on this earth. Money is indeed a power, but 
its greatest power isnotdispla3^ed on the stock exchange, 
or in the purchase of European titles. Its true power 
appears when by it a heavenly citizen saves his fellow 
man, drives awa^^ his despair, clothes and feeds his 
perishing children, and opens a broad, sure way for 
their self-realization = I sometimes let my imagination 
wander, picturing what a multi-millionaire might do if 
only he were a heavenly citizen. 

I have called your attention to the notable omissions 
from the beatitudes. No blessedness for knowledge, 
none for reputation, none for power, none for wealth. 

Accepting the conception of blessedness as the feel- 
ing of jo}^ which accompanies the knowledge that our 
best self is being realized, I think we are prepared to 
admit that these omissions are altogether justifiable. 
Certainh^ if this be true with regard to knowledge, it 
is true with regard to reputation, powder and wealth. 
There is no need of ringing the changes on these 

30 



words, and it would be absurd to assert that reputation, 
power and wealth do not give their possessors a keen 
and genuine happiness. Men are not fools ; they are 
not chasing phantoms when they pursue power, distinc- 
tion and wealth. In nine cases out of ten it is a case 
of sour grapes when the trudger on the roadside affects 
to despise his fellow man in the carriage. If, however, 
the Sermon on the Mount teach truth, and there are 
many rich, powerful and distinguished men who believe 
it does, then power, reputation and wealth are not the 
marks of heavenly citizenship. 

In approaching a separate study of the beatitudes, it 
will be of service to gather together certain leading 
truths which have thus far been presented and empha- 
sized. Religion is primarily a matter of feeling, the 
supreme religious command being always this (Mark 
xii:30, 31): "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all 
thy mind, and with all thy strength; " and the second is 
like, viz., this : " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy 
self." Love to God and to our neighbor compass the 
religious character. Love is our strongest and holiest 
feeling. Therefore, is religion primarily — chiefly — a 
matter of feeling. I have taken occasion to say that 
feeling is the deepest, the best, the most personal thing 
about any human being. There is no more monstrous 
thing about modern education than its maltreatment of 
feeling. Instead of suppressing feeling and the expres- 
sion of feeling, education should use its utmost endeavor 
to develop and direct feeling. The only men and women 
in the world who have done anything worth the doing 

31 



have been men and women of feeling. The Bible pro- 
fesses to be the source of religious truth. If we allow 
the claim, two consequences of great moment are 
inevitable. First, an3' use of the Bible which does 
not result in a strengthing and deepening of religious 
feeling is a misuse ; second, the Bible teachings must 
be a transcript of our own experience. In order to 
move a man a^ou must touch him ; this is as true of 
his feelings as it is of his intellect and his body. The 
Bible can not move ^^ou unless it touch 3-ou, it can 
not touch you unless between you and the Bible there 
is a communit}^ of nature, you must find 3'ourself 
and your daily life in the statements of the Bible. 

It is this end alone that I am seeking in these 
approaches to the Bible. M3' constant inquirs^ is this, 
does that portion of the Bible, which is called the 
Sermon on the Mount, touch us ; does it enter into 
our experiences, and so offer material for the strength- 
ening and deepening of our religious /^^//;z^/ 

Yet a further consideration : The ideal is the real 
only because the real is the ideal. There is a heaven 
bej'ond onh' because there is a heaven here. Time is 
an organic part of eternit3\ It is because we are that 
we shall be. No resurrection miracle is greater than 
the miracle of present daih^ life. That man, however 
humble his attainments or obscure his station, who 
possesses the characteristics named in this Sermon on 
the Mount, is here and now in the heavenh' kingdom, 
and that man who lacks such characteristics is not in 
the kingdom of heaven, and all the might of God can 
not put him in that kingdom. It used to be supposed 

32 



that the way to gain heaven was to despise earth ; it 
used to be supposed that the natural man was the 
opposite of the heavenl}- man, whereas, there is 
nothing unheavenly about the natural man except sin, 
sin is as contra natural as it is contra heavenl3\ Sin 
is contra ever^^thing that ought to be, and that which 
ought to be knows no distinction between time and 
eternity, no difference between earth and heaven. The 
truest way to enter heaven is to enter it on earth. 

Blessedness I defined as the joy which accompanies 
the conviction that our own best self is being realized, 
and thus I distinguished blessedness from happiness 
and pleasure. Blessedness admits of J03' in tribulation, 
of joy in discipline, of jo}" in sorrow. The kingdom 
of heaven is a condition in which our own best self 
is being realized through love to God and love to our 
neighbor. We now approach the beatitudes as so 
man}' statements which do or do not touch us, as 
statements which do or do not make known the true 
modes of our blessedness, of the realization of own 
best selves, of the kingdom of heaven. 



33 



''Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven^ 



I have said that it was not a part of ni}' endeavor 
to declare the exact consciousness of Christ as He 
uttered this beatitude. 

It is commonly said that, contrasting His disciples 
with the proud religious leaders of the people, He 
sought to console the weak followers by assuring them 
of the future possession of a heavenly kingdom. It is 
interesting to know that this beatitude appears abund- 
antl}^ and almost exactl}- in the Old Testament. 

LivSten : 

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord 
hath aiiiioiiited nie to preach good tidings unto the meek. 
He hath sent me to bind up the brokeu-heartecl, to proclaim 
liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them 
that are bound. To comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto 
them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, 
the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the 
spirit of heaviness." Isaiah 6i : i and 3. 

" P'or thus saith the high and loft}' One that inhabiteth 
eternity, whose name is Hoh\ I dwell in the high and holy 
place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to 
revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of tlie 
contrite ones." Isaiah 57 : 15. 

Who are the poor in spirit — who are the poor 
inspirit, whose spirit poverty constitutes them heavenlj-^ 
citizens? Wh}- am I not in the heavenly kingdom 

34 



unless I am poor in spirit? Why is my own best self 
not being realized unless I am poor in spirit? 

I name two commentator interpretations of these 
words, "poor in spirit," simply to show that we must 
be our own commentators. Two authorities (Achelis 
and Keil) add a word, and read "poor in the holy 
spirit." Others read "poor-spirited" (Grau). Let us 
rather say that the two w^ords, "in spirit," show the 
place or sphere wherein the povert}^ appears — that, 
therefore, this poverty is not of body or of minci, but 
of spirit. Now% povert}^ of spirit is emptiness of spirit, 
dissatisfaction of spirit; it is the not finding — not 
having w^hat spirit demands. The poor in spirit are 
those who recognize a lack, here and now, which 
neither wealth nor reputation nor learning can suppl3^ 
a lack which calls aloud for heaven on this earth. I 
do not hesitate to say that a consciousness of such lack 
is a vital, fundamental state of all heavenl}^ citizens. 
Without the consciousness of such lack your own 
best self can no more be realized than a filled vessel 
can be supplied with water. If you find all 3'ou need 
in mone}^, in reputation, in learning, what use have 
you for an3^thing else? It will at once be seen that 
this poverty of spirit can not coexist with conceit — 
wath a sense of self-importance. Imagine a conceited 
man experiencing povert}^ of spirit ; imagine a con- 
ceited man realizing his own best self; imagine him 
in the kingdom of heaven. Now, this is not because 
God is almighty and will not tolerate the conceited 
man — it is because the conceited man is almight\^ and 
will not tolerate God. For the conceited man there is 



no God — absoluteh' none — no matter how man}' 
churches he joins, how man}- creeds he signs, how^ 
many pra^xrs he orates, he is utterly without God in 
the world. For God, fortunately or unfortunately, is of 
such kind that He can not be had if He is not w^anted, 
— can not even give Himself where He is not desired. 
I am calling attention to a fact, as genuine and as ulti- 
mate a fact as that you see with your e3'e or hear with 
your ear. For the conceited man, the man who is not 
poor in spirit, there is and can be no God — no king- 
dom of heaven, no realization of the best self. God is 
the best being; now, if you are the best being, 3'ou are 
God and you can not grow. Let us subject the matter 
to this reasoning. The best in man is represented b}" 
his affections, and this is because these affections carry 
him be^'ond and above himself. Is not our finite body 
dependent on the infinite universe, the boundless air, 
the measureless light, the exhaustless warmth ? Is not 
our finite mind in like manner dependent on an infinite 
reality outside itself? What would become of that 
mind as mind, for which there was no more knowing. 
And does this law stop at that which is best, highest 
within us — our affections ? Does not our heart demand 
for its growth an infinitely good being whom it ma}' 
love? Now, the man who is not poor in spirit, aware 
of his povert}' of soul, has no need of God, /. e.. can 
not realize his own best self, can not be blessed. The 
poor in spirit have the very first requisite for the king- 
dom of heaven — they want it — they want a God to 
love — a perfect one to whom their hearts may draw 
near. Every sincere atheist admits the truth of what 

36 



I am now saying. I shall quote to you, as I always 
do to my students in the department of ethics, a 
sentence from one of the most recent and able Eng- 
lish atheists. He says: " I am not ashamed to confess 
that with this denial of God the universe to me has 
lost its soul of loveliness. When, at times, I think, as 
think at times I must, of the appalling contrast 
between the hallowed glor^^ of that creed which once 
was mine, and the lonely m3'stery of existence as I 
now find it, at such times, I shall ever feel it impossible 
to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is 
susceptible." That man knows the meaning of God 
for the soul of man. He knows that with God there 
is a kingdom of heaven on this very earth, and that 
without God there is nothing save the loneh' myster^^ 
of existence. When I hear such an utterance coming 
from the very depths of a strong-natured man, and 
then hear following it the pitiable drivel of young Mr. 
Conceit and young Miss Conceit, for conceit is not a 
matter of sex, I feel as though the whip and dunce 
block were needed. Tell me how it is possible, except 
by the most terrible miseducation, for a young man or 
3'oung woman to make the discover}- that the Bible is 
a superstition, the church a farce, prayer bad form. 
Here is an atheist, as strong mentally as any student in 
an American university, and he is not ashamed to con- 
fess that with his denial of God the universe to him 
has lost its soul of loveliness. He thinks at times of 
the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of 
that creed, which once was his, and the lonely myster}- 
of existence as he now finds it. Mr. Conceit and Miss 



Conceit, who have closed their Bibles, taken their 
names from the church register, and locked, with the 
key of their sublime culture, the chamber of prayer, 
will see this unwilling atheist in the kingdom of heaven 
and themselves thrust out. 

There is no place in the kingdom of heaven for any 
but those who are poor in spirit. Consider what I 
have called the sphere, the place, of this poverty — the 
spirit. This w^ord as here used refers to the seat of the 
affection's emotions — the passions of various kinds. 
We find the same word used in the same sense in the 
eighteenth verse of the Thirt3^-fourth Psalm, viz : "The 
lyord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart 
and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." That for 
which I am contending is that the Lord, even if he 
sought to do so, could not save any who were not of a 
contrite spirit. I can not save a student who is more 
than I am. Notice the word I use, who is more than I 
am. Suppose I have to deal with a student whose 
only measure of the teacher is the number of things he 
knows. This student sets himself zealously to work 
to discover m^^ ignorance — my ignorance not of the 
subject I am teaching, but of some book on that sub- 
ject, of some special fact connected with the subject. 
He satisfies himself of my ignorance, and to this extent 
and in this manner, I can never do that student one 
particle of service ; I can not communicate myself to 
him by any possibility. He is, in his own estimation, 
more than I am. Do you not see the law in this 
matter. If there be no poverty in your spirit there 
will be no riches there. If there be no humility in 

38 



your affections, your emotions, God can not touch you 
even though He long to do so with an infinite longing. 
If the truths of body and the truths of mind can not 
be communicated to young Mr. Conceit and young 
Miss Conceit, how shall the very highest truths of all, 
those that concern our ajfections, be given to one who 
wants them not? feels no need for them. 

" Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit, there is 
more hope of a fool than of him." 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the king- 
dom of heaven." 

Blessed are those for whom bread and meat and 
raiment and equipages and houses and lands are not 
enough, their spirit is still poor. Blessed are those for 
whom scholarship and learning are not enough, their 
spirit is still poor. Blessed are those for whose spirit 
nothing is enough save God — the Holy One — theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven now and evermore. 



39 



''Blessed are they that luoiirn, for they shall 
be eoiufortedy 



"I had been ruined — if I had not been ruined," 
these are words attributed to Themistocles, and may 
well refer to that desperate period in his OAvn and his 
country's history-, when the great King (Xerxes) was 
la3'ing waste Attica, whose inhabitants had fled to the 
adjacent island of Salamis. Here the Greek fleet had 
taken its station, while the Persian ships, to the num- 
ber of twelve hundred, were in the harbor at Phalerum. 
From their ships the Athenians saw Athens with its 
acropolis and temples perish in the flames. Dissension 
arose among the Greeks as to what should be done — 
bitter dissension, Themistocles desiring to decide the 
issue at Salamis, and the Spartan generals determined 
to move the fleet to the isthmus and so protect what 
remained of Greece. Three counsels were called and 
Themistocles saw that the decision was going against 
him. He was ruined. Then he saved himself and his 
countr3\ He sent word to the Persian fleet of the dis- 
sension among the Greeks, and that this was the ver>" 
time when, by moving their ships to Salamis, the 
Greeks could be utterly destroyed. While the Greeks 
were still wrangling in bitter dispute the Persian fleet 

40 



appeared before Salamis and the question of a battle 
ground was settled, Greece was saved and Themis- 
tocles was its savior. I have sought by this illustration 
to show that there is a vital connection between stress, 
trial, disaster and victors'. It is ruin, and nothing else 
that prevents ruin. "Hat nicht mich zum Manne 
geschmiedet die almachtige Zeit und das ewige 
Schicksal." "Was it not almighty time and eternal 
destiny that hammered me into a man?" 

Now, if this be the fact of the matter in the so-called 
secular kingdom, is it likeh* to be an}- the less a matter 
of fact in the heavenly kingdom ? 

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be 
comforted." 

Blessedness is the J03' we feel at the realization of 
our own best selves, and sorrow, all such sorrow, as 
comes to a man in the spiritual life, is one of the 
chiefest means for self-realization. To reach the core 
of this matter we need to consider that there is a sham 
mourning, as there is a sham for evers' excellency. 
You have no sorrow — mourning, that does not pene- 
trate to the center of your being, and so become a part 
of 3'our life. We have many transient mourners whose 
mourning will not work much blessedness — this is, 
either because they are shallow-natured, and therefore 
can not sorrow, or because their afflictions have not 
reached the spirit. 

It is continualh' said that sorrow and suffering are 
fearful m3-steries under the government of a good 
God. Now, would it not be a desirable thing to try to 
figure out how much sorrow would be left in the 

41 



world if men behaved themselves — behaved them- 
selves, I mean, for a generation or two? We ought to 
be a little more manl}^ with God than we are. 

Does sorrow, does mourning, always bring the 
blessedness of self-realization? This is the same thing 
as asking, does sunlight always bring health to the 
eyes? That depends upon the e3'es. A diseased, in- 
flamed eye will be ruined b}" a ra}' of sunlight. Does 
food, wholesome food, bring abounding health? That 
depends upon him who takes the food. There are 
man}' persons for whom food, the least food, is death; 
and because food is a necessity the}' die. Does sleep, 
an absolute necessit}' for rational life, always bring 
such life? Sleep is death for the man filled with 
opium. 

Gemdne sorrow always realizes our best selves, for 
we can not feel genuine sorrow unless we ourselves 
are genuine. The sorrow, the mourning, which an 
ungenuine man feels, works death, and only death. 
Consider the following picture: Here is a young man, 
inheritor of a sound body and a consequentl}' jo3'ous 
spirit. He is also the inheritor of large wealth ; from his 
childhood, all that modern knowledge could offer for 
his education has been offered and accepted. A re- 
fined taste has been cultivated, and religion has been 
experienced. His religion is the same as the singing 
of a bird in the jo3'OUS Springtime. Why, of course, 
God is good, let me praise him in my song. What 
self-realization is there here? Not even the 3^oung 
man himself has any idea as to what manner of being 
he is. The situation changes. Money takes to itself 

42 



wings and flies away, and with it fly troops of friends 
— those sunshine friends who disgrace the sunhght in 
which they bask. With poverty comes slander; for 
the slanderer — vilest of men — is careful to aim his 
arrows only at the man who is going down hill with 
his back turned. Now, it appears that the song of this 
youth had not a vestige of worth or of religion about 
it; his was a religion nursed in joy, and that is not the 
proper nurse for religion. 

This youth makes the discovery that he has been 
very unfairly, outrageously treated. He did not 
deserve to be bereft of money and money-friends. 
While he is thus bemoaning his loss and cursing the 
slanderer, sickness lays hold of him. Pain, something 
that he had heard tell of in story-books and news- 
papers, now grips him all over, gathers him in, folds 
him up and settles down to stay. Then this young 
man's soul rises in rebellion. He shakes his puny fist 
at God and the universe, and dies with hell in his 
heart. If things had only been different he would 
have died a sweet song-bird. This young man did not 
mourn, church member though he was, therefore he 
experienced no blessedness. He raved and cursed, 
and his lamentation was unto death. 

" Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be com- 
forted." 

There is a mourning which is unto life. It is the 
mourning of a sincere soul; it is the mourning unto 
repentance — unto self-realization; a mourning, with- 
out which there is no blessedness, no unfolding of our 
highest selves. Let us look at the ver}^ unfashionable 

43 



matter of sin. I know it is almost unpardonable to 
talk of ourselves as sinners. We make mistakes, of 
course — the best of people make mistakes, errare 
est hiunamun. But sin — oh, no, we do not sin; we 
do not choose the wrong course when we are perfectl}- 
aware that we might choose the right course. This is 
so old-fashioned, this talk about sin. Grant all that 
you sa}^ but kindly allow me to make an old, utterh' 
out-of-st3de supposition. Permit me to suppose that 
men are sinners; permit me to suppose that sin means 
death, moral death, soul death, eternal death, just as 
arsenic means death, ph^'sical death, eternal ph3^sical 
death. What a supposition! The supposition that 
there is sin in the human heart. Did 3'ou never 
meet my acquaintance, the hypocrite? He is the bot- 
tom man in hell. He uses smiles, and psalms, and 
prayers for the purpose of lying and stabbing. He is 
a professor of religion for the opportunity- it gives him 
to serve the devil. The only time he feels sad is when 
he is cornered and forced to tell the truth. You ma}- 
alwa^^s know when he has told the truth by the 
gloomy cast of his countenance. I am afraid this 
supposition, that there is sin in the human heart, will 
turn out to be more than a supposition. However, if 
there be sin in the human heart, its inevitable effect is, 
to prevent the realization of our own best selves, /. <f., 
to keep us out of the heavenly kingdom. 

Now, what is the first requisite to deliverance from 
sin? Sorrow for sin. Without sorrow for sin, mourn- 
ing for sin, there can be absolutelj^ no deliverance 
from sin. Here again a sham sorrow works its work 

44 



of death. The sorrow which the sinner feels is not 
because he is a sinner, but because he has been found 
out. He would have gone on with a smiling counte- 
nance and a song in his mouth, but, alas ! he has been 
found out. His sin was discovered ; then he did, in- 
deed, feel bad — oh, ver^' bad; he even committed 
suicide, his distress was so great. Such sort of mourn- 
ing will not be comforted ; no joy at self-realization 
will ever spring from such bitter waters. 

There is a mourning for sin which simply illustrates 
the law of cause and effect, b}' producing a repentance 
not to be repented of, and this mourning was put into 
words long 3'ears ago by the Publican who said, "God, 
be merciful to me, a sinner." 

I do not see how any human being can begin his 
self-realization without such an experience. He needs 
to know, I leave it entireh^ to you, does he not need to 
know, that sin must be mourned for simply as sin, 
regardless of all consequences? How is he to turn 
about in any other wa}', or from an}- other motive? 
Can God turn him about if he have not mourned the 
true mourning? We see at once that there is no power 
in heaven or on earth that can turn the sinner from 
sin if he do not mourn his sinfulness. 

I pass now to another characteristic of all true 
mourning — all genuine sorrow, which shows again the 
causal connection between grief and self-realization. 
Without mourning there can be no sympathy-, and 
w^hat would life be, what would our natures be, without 
sympath}'? Let us look at this closely, for I think we 
shall discern here one of the brightest rays of light on 

45 



a vety dark subject. I am sometimes inclined to 
believe that s^^mpath}^ is worth its cost. We could 
have a ver}- delightful world if there were no sin and 
no suffering. There might be, if death did not end 
all, an uninterrupted intellectual progress; there might 
be an equally uninterrupted esthetic progress. With 
no pain and no sorrow, ho^^^ sweet would be the fresh- 
ness of the morning — the glorious sweep of the sun, 
the deep night, with - its moon and stars. Without 
pain, without sorrow, how beautiful the flushing green 
of Spring, the rich Summer and the tinted Autumn ; 
but the touching of soul upon soul would be lacking. 
We could not know the meaning of comfort, for no 
one would need to be comforted. Our world would 
be one in which no sorrow had developed sjmipath}-. 
Yet there is no depth in the human heart like the 
depth of sorrow, and there is no comfort for the 
human heart like the comfort of one who has sorrowed 
with us, and so la3's heart upon heart. Is it not true 
that the soul that has not sorrowed is an imperfect 
soul and must remain an imperfect soul? Suppose 
3'ou were to meet a compan}' of angels — bright, 
glorious, but without sin, without sorrow. Would 3'ou 
not sa3" here are those for whom heights and depths of 
being are entirel}' impossible? They have never 
known the blessedness of being comforted — their love 
is necessaril}' dwarfed in its growth. Not for one of 
them has a mother ever laid down life, or a father 
S3mipathized in his distresses. More than this — far 
more than this — not one of them has done such divine 
work for another — not one of them, from the depths 

4() 



of his own sorrow, has said I love you, and will abide 
wdth you forever. 

" Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be com- 
forted." They shall have the joy of self-realization — 
they shall know that they are being perfected through 
suffering — they shall find stirring within them a divine 
compassion, a heavenly sympathy — they shall know 
that of which their nature is capable, viz., a Godly 
sorrow. Thus have I sought to establish our beatitude 
as a simple, beautiful statement of fact ; I have sought 
to have the beatitude touch you — to establish its truth 
by a direct appeal to your own experiences. It is 
worthy of reflection that He who uttered these words 
was pre-eminently known as the Man of Sorrows, the 
one acquainted with grief, and this it is that has 
brought Him so close to the heart of humanity. He 
has been called and accepted as our elder brother, 
touched with the feeling of our infirmities. I can not 
close my presentation without asking 3'ou to look at 
our beatitude as a picture of the future. In doing this 
I depart from the fundamental plan of these lectures. 

You will remember that I asked for the practice of 
a double charity — that those of you who accept the 
Bible as the inspired word of God, and those who con- 
sider it a purely human book, should lay aside these 
beliefs for the time being and join me in a distinct 
inquiry. This inquir}^ was, first, what facts in our 
daily lives point strongly to the existence of God and 
a kingdom of heaven ; second, what facts in our lives 
confirm the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. 



47 



I have not asked you to accept these teachings 
because Christ uttered them, but I have asked 3'ou to 
determine with me what facts in Hfe teach the same 
truths. 

You will, I think, bear me witness that, thus far, I 
have kept rigidly to ni}- plan. You have received 
nothing from me ex cathedra, but ever^^ teaching has 
been based upon what 3'ou knew to be true. 

Give me, then, the pleasure of trying to outline a 
picture, a picture of the future, and be not disturbed 
if this picture be realistic ; perhaps its realism will be 
its idealism. 

Have 3'ou ever reflected that, whatever may change 
in human history, there is one thing that changeth not, 
and that is, sorrow. Kings and princes pass awa}^ 
nations are absorbed and disappear — sorrow abides. 
It is said of the Man of Sorrows that, in the time of 
his trial, they all forsook him and fled. Has that 
awful desertion never been repeated? Now, \\\\2X does 
this omnipresence of sorrow prove, this consanguinity 
of sorrow^? It proves that, beyond all question, the 
best things still remain. There could be no sorrow at 
falsified friendship to - day unless friendship were 
precious to-day. There could be no sorrow at the death 
of the beloved to-day unless the beloved were beloved 
to-da3\ Our sorrows reveal our hearts, and the}^ do 
this as nothing else can. Who comforts us in our sor- 
rows? The true and S3mipathetic friend. He takes 
our hand, and we are comforted. " Blessed are they 
that mourn, for they shall be comforted." 



48 



The picture which Christianity has drawn athwart 
our heavenly sky is this: "A God of love and sympa- 
thy shall gather the true mourners unto himself and 
shall comfort them. He shall touch them with His 
pervading presence and they shall be comforted." 
Does that belittle God? Then, all hail the belittlement 
of God! Let us belittle Him until w^e touch Him. 
But this is no belittlement of God ; it is the divinest, 
sweetest conception of God that man can entertain. 
Are not love and sympathy our choicest selves? If 
God have these ver^^ same affections in perfection, is 
He not our dearest friend, touched with the feelings of 
our infirmities? 

We should not refine our God and the kingdom of 
heaven until the}^ vanish from our sight. There is so 
much pain, distress, short-coming in this finite life that 
we contrapose heaven to earth, and call heaven every- 
thing that earth is not. Pitiable and radical mistake. 
If we do not learn to love here and now, how shall we 
learn to love in heaven? If we do not draw near to 
God here and now, how shall we ever draw near to 
Him? Let us see our heavenly kingdom here and 
now — let us see the King in His beauty. 

Test this matter from the point of view^ of earthly 
friendship. Let us refine upon friendship. We do 
not, can not mean as friend, this particular person, 
because he, after all, is a ver}^ imperfect affair ; he 
eats and he drinks and he sleeps, and then he has his 
limitations from the inner side also ; he is sometimes 
jealous and demands over much. 



49 



We do not propose to degrade the noble idea of 
friendship by surrounding it with a body — basing it 
on a stomach. What we mean by friendship is pure 
friendship — it is the lofty idea — the glorious coyicep- 
tion. By and by, as we grow old and poor, every one 
forsakes us and flees. We now draw near to abstract 
friendship. " Oh, thou abstract friendship in th}' mag- 
nificent nothingness, draw near and comfort us." And 
nothing draws near — nothing comforts. 

The religious soul hears the words of our beatitude, 
"Blessed are they that mourn, for the}' shall be com- 
forted," and looks confidentl}' forw^ard to the time 
when God — the Supreme consciousness — the perfect 
Father — shall comfort him — in no abstract way, but as 
friend comfort eth friend. 



50 



" Blessed are the meek, for they shall 
inherit the earthy 



In the thirty-seventh Psalm we read as follows : ' ' For 
3^et a little while and the wicked shall not be — yea, thou 
shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. 
But the meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight 
themselves in the abundance of peace," (v. 10 and 11). 
"Evil doers shall be cut off, but those that wait upon 
the Ivord, the}^ shall inherit the earth." 

We see that the beatitude, which is the subject of 
our present meditation, is in part a literal quotation 
from the thirty-seventh Psalm. The meek, who in the 
Psalm, are said to inherit the earth, are pronounced 
blessed by Christ. 

Our fundamental inquiry is, I doubt, not clearly 
understood by you all. We ask who are these meek 
ones whose inheritance is the earth, and what necessary 
relation obtains between such meekness and such 
inheritance? In other words, is there anything in our 
daily experience which reveals a necessary, causal rela- 
tion between meekness and inheritance? We carry 
with us always in these studies that conception of 
blessedness which presents it as the joy attendant upon 
the consciousness of our self-realization. How come 

51 



the meek to be blessed by the knowledge of such self- 
realization in their necessary inheritance of the earth? 
It is plain that before we can enter into this deeper 
meaning of the beatitude we must determine who are 
the "meek," and what is the "earth inheritance." I 
have already called your attention to the movement of 
the Greek language through its three periods of youth, 
where speak Homer, Hesiod and Herodotus, of full 
vigor in strength and elegance, where speak the great 
tragedians — and Plato and Xenophon — its decline 
after the Macedonian conquest, and further still after 
the Roman dominion; where speak Aristotle, Potybius 
and Plutarch. 

The New Testament Greek is of this third kind, and 
represents for the most part such knowledge of the lan- 
guage as Hebrews would be apt to gather in the rela- 
tions of business and commerce. This imperfect 
knowledge of an imperfect language was set to the 
task of expressing the Old Hebrew Testament ; Greek 
was not meeting Greek, but Hebrew, and foreign con- 
ceptions were somehow to be clothed by a language 
that knew them not. 

In the New Testament there was no Hebrew origi- 
nal to guide the writers, and we find evidences of this 
lack continually. The English equivalents for the 
Hebrew -Greek w^ord "meek" in our beatitude are 
"mild," "gentle," and the same term appears repeat- 
edly in the New Testament in the very same meaning. 
There is not time here to quote these numerous pas- 
sages, yet I will read the last verse of the fourth chap- 
ter of Paul's first Corinthian letter, because it makes 



the matter very plain; "What will ye?" asks Paul. 
" Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love and in 
the spirit of meekness?" i. e., in the spirit of mildness 
and gentleness. Our beatitude then reads : 

"Blessed are the mild, the gentle, for they shall in- 
herit the earth." 

We have seen that these words are taken from the 
Thirty-seventh Psalm, and it is well known that the 
phrase " inherit the earth," was but a way of saying pos- 
sess the promised land, the land of Canaan, the end of 
a long journey and many trials. Christ's use of the 
words, " inherit the earth," the land of promise, could 
have reference only to the newer land, the spiritual 
land, the heavenly kingdom which he sought to estab- 
lish. Our beatitude, therefore, reads and means, 
" Blessed are the mild, the gentle, for they shall possess 
the kingdom of heaven.""'^ 

Is there any organic, necessary connection between 
the realization of our best selves and mildness and gen- 
tleness ? Why have we to be mild, gentle, if we would 
be blessed as heavenly citizens — happ}' in the joy of 
self-realization, whilesoever and wheresoever we live ? 
It is, I confess, a delight to me to know that our beati- 
tude pronounces no blessing upon Uriah Heep, or 
upon anj'^ of his numerous connections. What a pit}' 
that so sweet and true a word as meek should have 
come to stand for so despicable realit}' as Uriah Heep ! 

We have a sweet, a beautiful, a great thought to deal 
with this morning. Meekness, mildness, gentleness, 



"Read the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah, in special, the last verses, for 
the spiritual significance of this teaching. 



essential to heavenly citizenship, to that kingdom of 
heaven which we ma}^ enter here and now ; essential 
to that self-realization, the consciousness of which is, 
indeed, blessedness. How the truth of this sometimes 
pours over us like golden sunlight. I have walked 
often among the Swiss Alps, and it is their gentleness 
that makes them great. No fuming, no raging — im- 
mense, silent — they hold up some of the tenderest, 
sweetest spots on this earth, as Pilatus and Rigi hold 
up the Lucerne Lake. 

When power is gentle, how great that power. And 
here we are at the parting of the wa3\s in character, 
and here there be those who will turn aside and never 
enter the kingdom of heaven. How many men are 
gentle ? How many women are gentle ? How mau}^ 
children are gentle ? But you ask, what is this gentle- 
ness, w^hat is this mildness upon which such stress is 
laid? Here again I must brush away the obscuring 
cobwebs of sham. I know people who speak with the 
softest of voices — a turtle-dove voice — yet are the}^ not 
gentle. They are hyenas ; their pleasantest sounds 
are the crunching of your bones between their jaws, in 
the privacy of their den. It has become fashionable 
to be soft-voiced, to tread lightly, and to look like a 
dish of milk. How the devil must amuse himself as he 
watches his servants aping the virtues. 

There is another sham gentleness which I call the 
esthetic sham. There are some persons born to a 
sense of physical cleanliness, personal neatness and 
order — they are immaculate in their clothing ; if they 
possess wealth all their appointments are of the most 

54 



refined kind, bnt like Grandcourt they do not care 
" a languid curse " for any thing or any one but them- 
selves, and like Grandcourt they are capable of the 
most extreme brutality. In their natures there is no 
gentleness, no meekness whatsoever. What a kingdom 
of heaven they would make ! There is yet a higher 
and more refined sham gentleness, and some who 
exhibit it are not themselves aware of their own 
deficiency. These are delightful people to meet — 
they really love the beautiful — they have an all-per- 
vading sense for it ; nothing so much disturbs them as 
the unbeautiful, and here we reach the root of their 
character — it is beauty they love, and beauty long ago 
secured a permanent divorce from goodness. Put 
goodness in a smock frock, give his eyes a cross squint, 
deform his back, singe his hair and palsy his arms, 
and you could not draw these sweet people to him if 
he were the divinest soul among men. Moral beauty 
the}^ have not yet learned to discern. To worship the 
I^ord in the beauty of holiness — for this they are not 
adequate — therefore is their gentleness not such as 
admits to the kingdom of heaven, /. e., is it not such 
as will realize their own best selves. Do you not 
agree with me? Is there not something in our 
common nature higher than love of the beautiful and 
its attendant, gentleness, mildness, meekness? Rob 
these people of their beauty and you have put out the 
light of all their seeing. 

We return to our question for which we now seek 
an affirmative answer. What is the meekness, mild- 
ness, gentleness essential to citizenship in the heavenly 



kingdom? The best reply that can be given is the 
presentation of such gentleness in a concrete character. 
Gentleness is an abstract term, and all m}^ students 
know what to do with an abstract term ; the}' must 
find the person or the thing that stands for it. Where 
shall we go for that perfect embodiment of gentleness 
w^hich, as a living picture, will show the quality we 
seek. We go to a galley slave, an escaped convict, 
brutalized by mistreatment, hungry as the dog is 
hungry, he stands before the priest whose silver 
candlesticks are in his hands ; "he tells us," says the 
gendarme, "that you gave him these." " 'Tis so, my 
children, they are his." Jean Valjean stands alone in 
the night, the silver candlesticks still in his hands. 

Follow him from that hour and 3'ou follow a gentle 
man — not into, but in the kingdom of heaven. Jean 
Valjean w^as a meek, a gentle, a mild man. Was he 
weak ? His physical strength, which toyed with strong 
men as a child t03'S with thistle-down, was only an 
incomplete symbol of his character -strength. There 
is not in literature a sublimer portrait of moral con- 
flict and moral victory^ than this galley slave exhibits, 
when, as mayor of the village, beloved by all, the 
source of good to all, he learns that another man is 
about to be returned, as Jean Valjean, to the convict's 
prison. The other man is, indeed, a base man and 
deserving imprisonment. But ah, what a difference — 
he is not Jean Valjean. An honorable life — the 
tenderest, truCvSt, love of all who knew him, the bright 
and beautiful light of heaven, every thing that a strong 
man holds dear, to be given up forever — not onh' so, 

56 



but his place to be taken among the vile — ah, God be 
praised that such a triumph can even be conceived as 
was accomplished that night in the mayor's small, 
plain bed-room. Jean Valjean left all for duty, and so 
great, so transcendentally great was the force of his 
gentle character, that Inspector Javert, the embodiment 
of law as mere legality, was lifted by it into an atmos- 
phere of purity he had never conceived. The In- 
spector could not bear the shock of his own momentar}- 
greatness ; he allowed the good convict to escape, and 
then destroyed himself. Jean Valjean throughout his 
majestic moral history was a gentle, a meek man. If 
you wish to know how gentleness, meekness, not only 
comport with resistless strength, but justify and adorn 
it, study the course of his life. We meet now our most 
serious question : Is this meekness, is this gentleness 
an essential requisite for the kingdom of heaven, /. e., 
for the realization of our best selves, in the conscious- 
ness of which lies our blessedness ? What is there in 
your experience and mine that confirms this teaching? 
In the first place there is the testimony of our inner 
feeling. We somehow feel that when we have been 
gentle we have been at our best. For, and mark 
well the reason, it is not possible for us to be gentle 
and false, gentle and h^^pocritical, gentle and unreliable, 
gentle and self-seeking. Here again we need to dis- 
tinguish the sham from the real — true gentleness and 
the jovial temperament are not interchangeable terms. 
The jovial temperament is often but a matter of diges- 
tion and pocket-book, while gentleness goes to the root 
of character. The jovial man is capable of a 



brutalit}^ that would disgrace a grizzh' bear — the meek, 
the gentle man can not be brutal. What sa}^ 3^ou then 
to this thought^ the realization of 3-our best self 
demands that 3'ou shall be gentle, mild, meek? I do not 
hear much insistence upon this gentleness, this meek- 
ness, in our modern life. Our admiring gaze is lifted 
toward the hustler — now, there can be a gentle hustler 
— him we ma}^ admire, but the gentle hustler is almost 
as rare as a white crow. Vigor, enterprise, self-reliance, 
these are all praise-worthy, but they are not worthy of 
all praise, or the chief praise, 3^et this it is that the}' 
receive. Let me present you two fathers, do you decide 
which is the creation of imagination and which is the 
real evers^-da}' father. 

" M}' son, be meek, be gentle, in all that you do. It 
is far more important that you should be gentle than 
that 3'ou should be rich ; far more important 3^ou 
should be gentle than that you should attain reputa- 
tion ; look well after these inner excellencies, for 
without them you are nothing." Here is the other 
parent: "My son, bestir yourself; show some push; 
don't be so squeamish. You are too thin-skinned. 
Don't you want to be an^^bod}'? L^ook at Tom; he is 
walking right along ; that boy has got some sense ; he 
knows on which side his bread is buttered. It is none 
of your business to look after 3'our employer's morals. 
You do what he tells 3-0U. Why, if ever3'one was like 
3'ou, there would be no business done at all. You 
need not stand back, afraid to hurt somebody's feelings 
— that's his lookout. If he steps in 3'our wa^^ teach 
him a lesson. Why, ni}- boy, if I had acted as you 



do, and tried the gentle plan of doing business, I 
would have been in the poor-house years ago." 

Can a man who is not meek, not gentle, inherit the 
spiritual Canaan, the promised land? Can he be 
blessed with a joy of self-realization ? Ah, these are 
searching truths ! The}' cut to the ver}- quick of char- 
acter, yet they are not among the required studies of 
our modern curriculum. Much Latin, less Greek, 
some Mathematics, considerable Science, History, 
English Literature, a snatch or two at Philosophy — 
the Beatitudes? 

Yet, we have demonstrated that these beatitudes can 
be studied by a bod}^ of university students represent- 
ing the most varied and contradictory opinions. More 
than that, far more than that, the}' can be studied ex- 
clusively from their religious side. Episcopalians, and 
Presbyterians, and Methodists, and Baptists, and Con- 
gregationalits, and Swedenborgians, and Unitarians, 
and Catholics, and Hebrews, can make, and have 
made, common cause in a religioics study of the 
Beatitudes. Not onl}- so, the}- have agreed in the 
general religious results of our study. I would far 
rather be engaged in such work than in the dissem- 
ination of Biblical criticism. Be it observed, I impugn 
no man's motives, neither do I prescribe his duty, I 
simph' express a preference. I would rather, as meet- 
ing the imperative need of this time, and as meeting 
my own deepest want, consider religious truth in the 
light of daily experience. 

" Blessed are the meek, the gentle, for they shall 
possess Canaan, the land of promise, the kingdom " — 
of heaven. 

59 



No man but the gentle man can possess the king- 
dom of heaven, because he onl}- can reaHze his best 
self here and hereafter. I said that this was not only 
a sweet, a tender truth, but a great and a glorious 
reality. There is so much in it that I know not where 
to stop my presentation. 

The onty alternative to gentleness, to meekness, is 
force, SHEER FORCE. The alternative is not strength, 
for strength is made sweet and precious b}^ gentleness. 
The alternative is sheer force. Many of our so-called 
great men are mere forces, like lightning, or gravita- 
tion, or steam. They bear down opposition like an 
avalanche, or cut through it with the damascene edge 
of their intellect. Do 3'ou not see that this is all sheer 
force? Weld your blade, till, like Saladin's, it parts a 
silken pillow, or, like Richard's battle ax, it cleaves a 
mace in twain ; you have but a different adjustment 
of force — sheer force. Refine 3^our intellect, till, like 
Talle3^rand's, it cuts all difficulties with its lying 
edge ; or make it massive, cold and hard, till, like 
Napoleon's, it crushes and sweeps away all resistance. 
It is a matter of directed force. 

Picture a kingdom of heaven of such sheer forces; 
either there is no kingdom of heaven, or these people 
will be compelled to pass their time elsewhere. 



60 



'Blessed are they that hunge?' and thii'st after right- 
eousness, for they shall be filled ^ 



What is the truth in these words ? What facts in 
our hves repeat this beatitude? Are hunger and thirst 
after righteousness necessary for the reahzation of our 
best selves ? 

L,et us consider the two sides of the statement, 
"hunger and thirst," "after righteousness." 

Hunger and thirst, physically speaking, are sensa- 
tions, sensations with the least amount of knowledge 
in them. We share them with the animals and the 
imbeciles. It is by the finger tips, the ear, the eye 
that we know, by hunger and thirst we may be driven 
mad and turned to beasts. What a strange place for 
hunger and thirst — in a beatitude. But hunger and 
thirst are the words to use ; no others can take their 
places. They stand for those resistless feelings in the 
soul, which will never leave that soul in peace, till they 
are satisfied. And here, at the center as it were of the 
beatitudes, is emphasized the magnificent truth which 
binds them together. They are all feeling. Blessed 
the poor in spirit — blessed they that mourn — blessed 
the meek — blessed the merciful — blessed the pure in 
heart — blessed the peace-makers — blessed the perse- 

61 



cuted. This seem wonderful. What is the meaning 
of it all? It means first and fundamentally that there 
is nothing so absoluteh' our own, our vers' selves, as 
our feelings. Test this ; close 3'our outer eyes, and 
with the inner e^^e behold 3'our thoughts, 3'our plans, 
your purposes, come and go across the theater of 3-our 
mind. Open the eye of flesh and behold your decision 
as 3'ou bring it forth by act of will, see 3'our resolute 
determination, as it grasps the pen and signs the paper, 
shaping, it may be, your destim' for life. These 
thoughts and this volition you can stand over against 
and contemplate. But what of the feelings that wrung 
3'our heart as 3'ou signed the paper: did 3'ou see them — 
did they come and ago across the stage? Alas, no. 
The3' were 3'our vers' life — if ever you could put them 
into words, then were the3' thoughts about 3'our feel- 
ings, feelings no longer. As a man feeleth, so is he. 

This reveals the mission of feeling in human life. It 
stands midwa3' between knowledge and action^ 
knowledge — fact is. its source, and b3' it in turn 3'ou 
are moved to deed. This is the law of your life, and 
from it there is no escape. Let me illustrate m3' mean- 
ing b3' the most unusual and out of the way illustra- 
tion imaginable. I will illustrate b3' what is called the 
logical feeling. That is a most unheard of feeling, is 
it not ? As far as it seems real at all, it seems painful 
and drear3'. But consider. Do 3'ou recognize such a 
feeling as the feeling of pleasure in clearness and 
order, and of pain at obscurit3' and confusion ? This 
is the stirring of the logical feeling within 3'ou. Give 
heed to it for vour own sake and for the sake of all 



who ma}' come within the sphere of your influence. 
As 3'ou are moved b}' this feeling in greater or less 
degree, will be your striving toward clear and well 
ordered forms of thought. But there is something 
deeper about this logical feeling — its center, its heart, 
is the pleasure we find in agreement and the pain we 
find at disagreement, among the contents of our minds. 
Let us suppose that we had no such feeling — that our 
mind's life was at the beginning a mere knowing — 
then the most incongruous knowledge would be the 
same as an}- other — not one of us would be led to 
make the slightest effort to think. Why should we 
take the trouble to change our mental status when all 
arrangements of them seemed alike. How feeling — 
3'es, this poor, despised, logical feeling — changes all 
this. We are pained by disagreement and delighted 
b}' agreement, and under the stimulus of this feeling 
we move heaven and earth for truth, for agreement, 
for unit}', in our minds. Disorder, disagreement, tor- 
ment us because the}' threaten to destroy the intellect 
itself. In the same way operates the feeling of con- 
science of that awful ought — it would preserve us from 
the moral cleaving of ourselves in twain. It is then a 
fact that the logical feeling moves men to think, to 
search out agreement in the seemingly contradictor}' 
phenomena of the world and of human life. 

In like manner feeling for righteousness moves men 
toward righteousness. You must want righteousness 
as in your bodies you hunger and thirst after food. As 
hunger and thirst may mount in their intensity until 
they drive men blind and mad in search for food, so a 

63 



hunger and thirst after righteousness ma}^ stir men 
with a holy zeal which shall blind them to all personal 
consequences, loss of propert}^ of reputation, of friends, 
of life itself. Will anything do this work or give you 
this power but hunger and thirst. Behold the bearing 
of the truth on the realization of your own best selves. 
He who has never known hunger, who has never 
known thirst, has never known the meaning of nour- 
ishment. He has never felt the life-pulses quicken 
within him ; he has never known what a divine thing 
it is to live. This is as true for one part of our nature 
as another. We are to see that this is a law — a neces- 
sary and universal mode of our entire being. 

Want, a feeling of want, is essential to our proper 
nourishment. Speaking now physically, that food only 
does a man the highest good which is eaten with a 
consciousness of w^ant. Conscious hungering for food 
gives more than half its power to food. In like man- 
ner, if 3^ou do not hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness, you Avill not be filled with righteousness. Right- 
eousness is something you must want before 3^ou can 
have it, or before it can do you any good. What is 
this righteousness after which I must hunger if I 
would become a heavenly citizen ; would realize my 
own best self? And here there is need of that charity 
of which I have spoken at so much length. Let no 
believer in the doctrine of imputed righteousness be 
reluctant to say that righteousness is rightness. If 
Christ was righteous. He was right; a righteous 
being is a right being. The kingdom of heaven is 
made up of right beings, not of wrong beings. Now, 

64 



right, as a quality of the soul, is something born there 
of love and choice. No man can put it on from with- 
out, neither can God thrust it into the soul by His 
almighty power. Such is righteousness, or rightness, 
as a soul quality, as a fact outside the soul, righteous- 
ness is either the holy nature of God or the immutable 
law of matter. We do not like to speak of gravitation 
as righteous, or attraction or repulsion as righteous, or 
the straight line as righteous. Yet there are left us 
only the two alternatives. There is a Holy Being, 
whose nature is the supreme source of all right, or 
right is the immutable way in which this universe 
goes. Get into line with the universe, and you are in 
line with right. Such may be the righteousness of the 
atheist — obedience to law. See, now, the advantage of 
him who judges that he has reason to believe in God's 
righteousness or rightness. He is still obedient to 
law, but it is loving obedience to the law of a lyOv- 
ing Intelligence. To hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness is to hunger and thirst after that which is 
right in all things. Now, observe, of such hunger and 
thirst is rightness born as a quality in the soul. The 
strong feeling of hunger moves the soul to will the 
right, as the soul, at the given time, understands the 
right. Nothing but hunger and thirst for the right 
will do this decisive work. " Blessed are they who 
hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they 
shall be filled" — filled with what? With that for 
which they hunger and thirst. And here we reach 
the fundamental reality announced in this beatitude. 
You may hunger and thirst for other things and never 

65 



get them. You ma}- hunger and thirst for wealth, yet 
remain poor; hunger and thirst for learning, 3-et re- 
main ignorant; hunger and thirst for power, yet re- 
main obscure. You ma}- not hunger and thirst for 
righteousness — rightness — and not receive it, for hun- 
ger and thirst bring it, because it is the heart's adop- 
tion of the right way. In the moral world there need 
be no defeat. 



66 



' Blessed are the inerciful^ for they shall 
obtain mercy. '' 



One of the ablest, most authoritative students of the 
Sermon on the Mount remarks that, with this beati- 
tude, the discourse addresses itself to those who 
possess, and not, as heretofore, to those who desire. 
The poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn, those 
who hunger and thirst after righteousness, represent 
desires; the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace- 
makers, the persecuted, represent possession. 

It does not seem to me that the real principle of 
division in these beatitudes has been thus rightly 
stated. Desires are no less possessions of the desiring 
soul than are what we call qualities, such as mercy and 
pure-heartedness. Meekness is as much a possession 
of the soul as mercy. If there be any distinction 
among the beatitudes at all akin to the one I have 
mentioned, it is that we now reach characteristics of 
heavenly citizenship, which are necessarily active. 
Mercy which is not actively merciful toward another 
is not mercy, and a peace-maker who makes no peace 
with any one is not a peace-maker. Still, I do not 
regard even this division as fundamental, for desires 
always prompt to action, and their realization is quite 



certain to involve others in manifold ways. This much, 
however, of the present distinction is left us ; if we 
can imagine ourselves as gentle, meek, without being 
actively- so, in daily conduct and toward others, we can 
no wise imagine ourselves as merciful without actively 
displaying such merc3\ Among the surprises I have 
met in the religious study of the Beatitudes and of the 
Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the chief surprise is 
due to the very little that has been said or written 
respecting so remarkable a portion of Scripture. This, 
I know, is, in part, occasioned b}^ the belief earh^ fos- 
tered in the Church, that Christ's sermon was a sort of 
spiritualized Judaism, or legalism, soon to be super- 
seded b}^ the fuller revelation in His own person, and 
b}^ the Pauline doctrines. Nevertheless, it is strange 
that in these later days, these da3^s of enlightenment, 
students and teachers have not approached the great 
discourse as a body of statements worth}^ to be tested 
by daily life. I find it almost equall}^ remarkable that, 
of the little that has been said concerning the Beati- 
tudes, the very least has fallen to the share of our 
present beatitude — "Blessed are the merciful, for they 
shall obtain merc3\" There is no more suggestive 
utterance among the Beatitudes than this, none more 
searching in its application to human character, none 
more abundantly confirmed b}^ experience. 

Whatever we come to accept as the proper concep- 
tion of merc3^ and the merciful man (and I sincere^ 
hope we shall agree here), one fact remains unques- 
tioned, viz. : that the exercise of merc}' obliges us to go 
out of and beyond ourselves. By mercy we are forced 

68 



away from self to another self, and the hfe lesson is 
learned that only by such active self-forgetfulness is 
self realized. Observe here where the emphasis falls, 
which is not a matter of oratory but of truth. I say 
by mercy we are forced away from self to another self, 
and only by such an active self-forgetfulness is self 
realized. You must forget ^^ourself in another self to 
realize 3-ourself. Why is this ? The reason is two-fold 
— first, because it is onh' when 3^ou are out of and 
be3'ond 3'ourself, that 3^ourself is health3\ The healthy 
character is the self -forgetful character; second, 
because onh' another self can arouse 3'ourself to action. 
You can not love a diamond, a rose, or a bird, a stone, 
a plant, or an animal, as 3^ou love a person. Let us 
look more closety at both sides of this searching 
doctrine — this strong meat. I sa3^ the health3' char- 
acter is the self -forgetful character ; self -consciousness 
is a sign of disease. As it is possible b3" mere con- 
centration of attention upon a perfecth^ healthy arm 
or heart, or lung, to produce disorder there, so it is 
possible b3' narrowing attention to self to vitiate everv^ 
facult3' 3-0U possess. The selfish man is an unrealized 
man, he has defeated himself absoluteh- memor3% 
imagination, power of thought, will, are stunted, dis- 
eased, b3^ self-seeking. This fatal issue shows itself 
most markedh^ where we should most expect it in 
man's highest self — his feelings. No man can love 
himself alone and grow on the food. It is as though 
the lungs should fall in love with themselves, with 
their marvelous structure, and refuse air, or the 
stomach with its wonderful character, and refuse food. 

60 



As the body must go out of itself to grow and live, so 
must the mind and soul go out of themselves to 
develop. It is a fact, no less sad than real, that the 
truth of which I speak is admitted with regard to 
man's body and his mind, but unheeded or denied 
with respect to his soul, /. e., his highest self. Goethe 
led a healthy life physically and intellectually for many 
years. There was no morbid self-examination as to 
his body or his intellect, and we behold in him the 
expected, the inevitable results — ph3^sical and mental 
powers at their highest. He forgot his body and 
forgot his mind in life, abounding, outward life, and in 
intellection. He instinctively' avoided all stress or 
strain — the fever of youth was not with him a disease, 
did not taint his early manhood or maturity. He was 
a magnificent physical and intellectual personality ; 
he went out of himself to a certain extent, and to that 
extent only he realized himself. What he gave the 
world was as spontaneously, irresistibly given as what 
he received was spontaneously appropriated. It is 
not in evidence that he loved any one — loves — yes, 
love — no, his worshippers say that he was above 
passion, either for a person or a cause; here there 
was no self-forgetfulness or absorption. To be above 
passion for a person or a cause is to come short of the 
highest human self. Had there been added to Goethe's 
character an ardent affection for men, a love for 
humanity, the equipose might have been disturbed, 
but the man would have been greater. I have pur- 
posely selected this example, and my reasons are two : 
I have been and shall never cease to be an admirer of 

70 



Goethe's sympathetic intellect and his perfection of in- 
terpretation. The greatest of what he did will never 
again be as well done. The Faust story has had its 
complete artistic embodiment. Goethe was able to 
project his work and to look at it over against himself 
as a true artist must always do ; but the true artist is 
not the highest type of man, he does not realize our 
nature as only the heavenly citizen can realize it, and 
here appears my second reason for this illustration. 
Goethe has been the ideal of the literar}- student ever 
vsince Carlyle presented him to the English mind. 
The English student has pilgrimaged to Weimar, and 
removed his shoes as he entered the holy place. 
Therefore do I say there is a better than Goethe — a 
higher reach of our nature — a diviner outcome possi- 
ble for us all. " Blessed are they that mourn, for they 
shall be comforted." There was no mourning with 
Goethe. I say with him, m him, of him. He looked 
at the shadow of life, but it never darkened the inner 
heart of him. Therefore he could describe it. " Blessed 
are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth." No 
one ever spoke or thought of a gentle Goethe, and 
thereby is the gentle Christ diviner. " Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God." No one ever 
spoke or thought of a pure - hearted Goethe, and 
thereby is Jesus of Nazareth, spiked between two 
thieves, nearer to God. 

What was the characteristic of the sad Jesus — not 
His health of body or His strength of mind — it was 
His love for man. "I lay down my life," He said. 
Goethe laid down no life; we are not assured that he 

71 



even made a sacrifice. Well, friends, these teachings 
are not in the university curriculum, and modern 
education makes for them almost no provision. You 
can rise to professorship and authorship without them, 
but 3^ou know, as I know, that the j^oung man, the 
woman in this room who shall most realize these truths 
will most realize their natures. 

"Blessed are the merciful, for the}^ shall obtain 
mercy." What is mercy and what is it to be merciful? 
Here is the conception of mercy, which I earnestly 
commend to j^our thoughtful acceptance. Merc3^ as a 
quality in character, is the product of that personal 
attitude of sympathy which is the result of individual 
temptation and suffering. No man, as I think, can be 
merciful who is lacking in this, and no man can possess 
such S3mipathy without being merciful. Men are not 
born merciful ; children are brutalh^ cruel, without 
being so, /. <?., the}' are savages without knowing it. 
How they torture animals without a sense of torturing. 
And some of these children grow up on the food of 
wealth, with no pain, and are unconscious barbarians 
to the da}' of their death. They really do not know, 
can not imagine, that their luxury and their sweet- 
scented indifference are drawing the life-blood of hun- 
dreds. 

The dictionary- definitions of mere}- are far from sat- 
isfactory. They present merc}-, either by direct state- 
ment or implication, as a quality that runs athwart 
justice. "Mercy," says a standard dictionary, "is a dis- 
position to overlook injuries, or to treat an offender 
better than he deserves, an inclination to forego jus- 



tice, to remit penalty," to forgive obligation. The 
English for the Greek word in our beatitude is less 
objectionable, not from what it contains, but from what 
it does not contain. Pitiful, compassionate, actively 
so, are the English renderings for our Greek word. 
Active pity, active compassion, might, however, be 
taken in the dictionary sense as exhibiting an inclina- 
tion to forego justice, to remit penalty, to treat an 
offender better than he deserves. 

Now, two things seem to me clear in this matter — 
first, there is a settled conviction in the general mind 
that mercy and justice are at variance with one another; 
second, if this be so, there is a moral split in man's 
nature which makes right living impossible. There is 
nothing more human — more divinely human, about 
the best man, than a demand for justice. There is 
nothing deeper, more radical in his nature, than this 
same demand for justice. Now, if at the call of 
mercy, he be required to forego justice, he is at war 
with himself. This lies in the very nature of moral- 
ity — that which is moral ought always to be done ; if 
mercy be moral it ought always to be practiced ; if 
justice be moral it ought always to be exercised. How 
then can a man, morally speaking, be mercifully 
unjust? Is it not a fair assumption that no such inner 
division of man against himself exists? Is it not fair 
to suppose that we may have been creating a schism, 
by misreading facts, as we turn the wind into a sigh 
or groan, and a tree-trunk into a pursuing enemy. 

To know whether mercy crosses justice, we should 
know the meaning of justice. Are you prepared with 

73 



a definition of justice? To speak less formally, what 
say you of justice? What is the fact covered by this 
constantly used and abused word? No less a man 
and thinker than Mr. Mill has said that justice is what 
is commanded, ordered. Mr. Mill, I regret to say, 
presents this as the root idea of justice. He betakes 
himself to the Latin language and finds that jubeo 
means to order, command — justum, something ordered 
or commanded; therefore, justice is, at bottom, the 
expression of a command. If this were a matter to be 
settled by etymolog^^ I might insist that Mr. Mill should 
go to the German and English languages, and take 
the word richten, which means to straighten, from 
which comes the word recht, which means right, as 
the right way to a place is the straightest way, and the 
right hand is the hand most used to straighten things. 
Here in this physical meaning of the German word 
and our physical use of it, we reach the heart of the 
matter. When the Germans come to use this word, 
in a moral sense, the}^ say, "das rechte soil man thun 
das unrechte soil man lassen." The straight shall a 
man do ; the unstraight shall he leave. Why ? Because 
if he do not he will sufier the consequences of the 
crooked way. Instead then of telling us that justice 
is something commanded, let Mr. Mill rather tell us 
wlty an^'thing is <fz'(?r commanded? A true command 
is the expression of the necessary ways in which 
things go. The man who discovers these ways and 
states them, he is the legislator in science and in gov- 
ernment. By this conception and by this alone we 
remove from the word "command" that which has no 

74 



business there, viz.: the idea of '' ivilir God did not 
will the decalogue into being; He was the deca- 
logue, and by that writing on Sinai's top He simply 
revealed Himself. 

Have patience. The practical side of the teaching 
draws near, and it may come with a force we will not 
enjoy. Men speak of natural justice, and of civil 
justice; and, alas, for the weakness of man! this dis- 
tinction will always abide. Yet it is not of such kind 
as is often supposed. Justice, as natural justice, is 
nature working, realizing herself, and this by the 
straightest, shortest, surest ways possible. Your friend 
falls from an Alpine height, and is destroyed. Do 
you shake your fist at gravitation, exclaiming, Oh, un- 
just gravitation! Oh, unmerciful gravitation! Your 
innocent child falls forward into the fire of the grate, 
and is destroyed. Do you cry out, Oh, unjust fire ! 
Oh, unmerciful fire! You pass unknowingly the 
house of contagion, and rise from death's door 
scarred for life. Do you cry out, Oh, unjust law! Oh, 
unmerciful law! Ah, you reply, I make none of these 
outcries; for gravitation, fire, and disease have no 
ears with which to hear me — if they had, my crying 
would be long enough and loud enough. Friend, you 
contemplate only half the truth, even as concerns 
what you call deaf nature. Your friend slips from an 
Alpine height and is so bruised and broken that 
neither you nor any man can restore him ; the physi- 
cian adjusts the bones, anoints the bruises, and leaves 
him to — whom? To this same nature, and she saves 
him; bone grows to bone, tissue is renewed, and your 



friend greets you as of old. The burned child who 
could not help but fall is clothed by nature — no man 
could do it — with a new flesh and a new skin, fairer 
than before. The diseased germs which you inhale 
are met by health germs within your bod}^ and what 
none but nature could do is done — you pass on un- 
harmed. Suppose we had only physical nature to 
deal with, and our accounts with her were strictly bal- 
anced. Violations of her blessed laws, times without 
number, disaster setting in upon us — righteous disaster 
— human aid powerless, she saves us, gives us another 
chance. Wh}^ do we see only one side of this mag- 
nificent shield? It were as eas}^ as true, to picture 
nature tender, merciful, full of pity, as to picture her 
harsh, stern, inexorable. 

Nature is neither one nor the other; neither just 
nor unjust, neither merciful nor cruel, neither God nor 
demon. Justice is a term which we use, and rightly 
use, only of intelligence, of men, and of a self-con- 
scious God. What, then, is human justice? It is 
man's discernment, statement, and enforcement of the 
ways in which things act when they realize their 
nature. Do you wish any other justice than that you 
be given opportunity to realize yourself, that every 
effort of yours have its legitimate consequences? Be 
not a coward. If you make no effort, take the conse- 
quences; if you make the wrong effort, take the con- 
sequences ; if you sin, take the consequences. 

When a man rises to the full measure of the con- 
ception of life, he is content to take things as they 
are. He knows that were he what he might be and 

76 



ought to be he would be worth}- of God. When a 
man rises to the full measure of the conception of life, 
he knows that he is in a system, a universe which will 
work together for his good if he get into line with it. 
He finds his life in obedience, and, being obedient, he 
never complains of injustice. 

Behold now the place and work of mercy. Mercy 
is in strict accord with the strictest justice, as she in- 
troduces the divine element of loving sympathy, lov- 
ing approval of the ways, the modes of being, loving 
sympathy for the man who would keep these ways. 
Here is a mercy worth the while. Not that miserable 
falsification of mercy w^hich is the ruin of thousands. 
Here is a mercy which will stop at no sacrifice to aid 
man in keeping the laws, the ways of his nature, be- 
cause in them only is life. Ah, the sham mercy ! The 
sham mercy born of indolence and sentimentality ! It 
has filled many a prison, and brought many a. fellow- 
creature to his execution. 

I shall illustrate and enforce this teaching by the 
most homely, yet searching examples. A boy, heed- 
less, thoughtless, falls from an upper window; his arm 
is badly broken. It will be at the cost of severe pain 
that the straight thing, the just thing, be done that 
heedless boy. Now, where is the parent whose sham 
mercy, begotten of indolence and sentiment, would 
release that chiM from pain? The merciful parent 
would hold the child to the pain if it cost the parent's 
very life. That is true parental love, true mercy, true 
compassion. Here is the trial of love, of mercy; 
mercy must yield to no pleading, no cry for relief, but 



hold the child — his child — to the surgeon's grasp, till 
the just thing has been done. Now, if this be so in 
things of the flesh, how much more is it so in things 
of the mind and heart. A heedless boy, from heed- 
lessness, not from malice, will not be neat, orderly, or 
industrious. The very bone and sinew of his mind 
are being malformed. He is as certain to grow up 
crippled in intellect as the other is in bod3\ What, 
again I ask, is parental mercy. It is that loving sym- 
path}^ with the bo}^ which holds him to neatness, 
order and industry, at the cost of the parent's very 
life. When the parent is tired, and worn and anxious, 
from the burdens of his dail}^ toil, he nevertheless 
finds time to be truh^ merciful to his child. He ap- 
points a time for neatness, and order, and study with 
the bo3', and he keeps the appointment. He punishes 
in mere}' and in love, as he straightens the broken 
arm. One of his severest parental trials is connected 
with the exercise of this mercy. He not only suffers 
with the suffering of the child whom he loves, his 
own mercy is mistaken for cruelty and his love for 
hatred. This error, however, is as sure to be corrected 
as the parent's mercy and love are genuine. 

Return we now, for a moment, to the conception of 
mercy previouslj^ given. It was said that merc}', as a 
quality in character, is the product of that personal 
attitude of sympathy which is the result of individual 
temptation and suffering. What a progressive deepen- 
ing and enriching of character! What a turning of 
darkness into light ! What a transformation of suffer- 
ing and trial into sympath}^ and love ! In character 



everything costs, and its cost is in proportion to its 
value. Air, water and sunlight ma^- be free. Mercy, 
justice and truth are never bestowed, they are earned. 

The citizen of the heavenly kingdom is merciful; 
animated b}' a loving compassion, born of his own 
sorrows, he stands by his fellows to the end. 

In that wonderful book, which closes Scripture 
record, we read, "and I saw a new heaven and a new 
earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were 
passed away, and I saw the hoh^ cit}', the New Jerusa- 
lem, coming down from God out of heaven." A beau- 
tiful vision truly — but that of Avhich it is a type is 
better — the invisible cit}', the inner Jerusalem, which 
is coming, not down from above, but up from below — 
up from the sin and the sorrow, the toil and the dark- 
ness. Oh, for one glimpse of the inner Jerusalem of 
character. 



79 



'' Blessed ai'e the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God.'" 



"The earth is the lyord's and the fuhness thereof, 
the world and they that dwell therein." 

" For He hath founded it upon the seas and estab- 
lished it upon the floods." "Who shall ascend into 
the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy 
place? " " He that hath clean hands and a pure heart." 
"Create in me a clean heart, O God." I tremble as I 
approach this beatitude. The reality' in the utterance 
is so real, and at the same time so spiritual, that I 
hesitate to touch it, as I would hesitate to touch a per- 
fect and a priceless gem. 

In none of our studies hitherto have I so much 
needed 3'our help as now, and the help which I need 
is an attitude of reverent earnestness. La}^ aside, if 
indeed any of you have put it on, lay aside the critical 
spirit. The critical spirit is rather the edge — the 
sharp of our minds, than their full-front open-to-<2// 
truth. There are truths which our dissecting knife 
will not lay bare, and these, just these, are our most 
precious truths. Life escapes all probing and the 
spirit flies from the microscope, yet life and spirit are 
our treasures. 

80 



In the inanA^ years of my relations with students in 
this class-room I have spoken little of myself, as all 
who have come before me will bear witness, yet am I 
persuaded that none know me better than my stu- 
dents. The intimate class-room relations sustained 
through many 3-ears have declared me better than 
any autobiography could have done. Respecting one 
of my characteristics, perhaps the central one, I am 
sure all my students are agreed. They know that I 
have sought to give positive, not negative, instruction, 
and that I have given it with all my heart. 

The questions that arise in the studj^ of logic, of 
consciousness and of conscience, . are personal ques- 
tions, and my classes know that I have presented them 
constantly from their personal, practical aspects. Since 
this is so, the confession I now intend to make, and 
the revelation of myself I shall now set forth, ma3' 
not onl}^ be pardoned, but may be received with direct 
helpfulness in our stud}-^ this morning. Looking back 
as far as 1867-1870, as by analyses and papers of 
various kinds I am enabled to do, I find that I was 
nothing but a critic, in the small, negative sense of 
that term. I would hear a discourse or a lecture, and 
feel a pride in discovering the weak points ; I rejoiced 
if I could show that the logic was shocking, and that 
the speaker did not know what he was about. I was 
like a person passing through an orchard in search of 
defective fruit only. I was like a person walking 
through a garden of flowers seeing onh^ the worm in 
the bud. I was like a person walking to and fro 
among his fellows, and seeing only their sins and their 

81 



failings. I knew nothing at all as I ought to have 
known. Imagine a world all leaden in color — that 
was ni}^ world. Imagine a perpetual day of judg- 
ment, that was m}^ day — perpetually — and / w^as the 
judge. What a heaven-full of truth, of beaut3^ of J03-, 
I lost. The birds were singing, and I did not hear 
them; the light was shining, and it did not illumine 
my path; the Bible was in my hand, and it did not 
build me up — God forgive me. I studied the Bible 
three long years in a theological seminary, and never 
saw God in the burning bush, or heard His still, small 
voice after the whirlwind, or walked with him in the 
cool of the day. I parceled off the Bible into sections, 
and went at it with the hammer and tongs of commen- 
tators. I studied the Psalms, the Book of Job, and 
the Gospel of John as they study a man, a man on 
the dissecting table. Day before ^-esterda}' I stumbled 
upon a paper of mine concerning the authorship of 
John's Gospel ; the paper is ver}' long, and contains a 
prodigious amount of hard work, but it does not con- 
tain any of the Gospel of John. 

All these things I did, and left the other undone. I 
studied the gates and the floors of the New Jerusalem, 
but the king in his beaut}' I never saw. Yet it was 
not in me to pass through life a scalpel, or a testing 
tube, or a dissecting knife. The time of my new 
birth came, and I saw what I would have you see — 
that this is a positive world, an afhrmative world, a 
world of light, of life, of beauty — a world so wonder- 
ful, so glorious, so full of divine realities, that you need 
but be pure-hearted to see God in it everywhere. 

82 



So then you will turn the edge of your mind from 
our beatitude this morning, and bring your best self, 
full - fronted, reverent, earnest, to its consideration. 
The Sistine Madonna is not to be understood b}^ the 
thin inches of a tape-line. 

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." 

And what does our experience teach us about the 
word "pure" and about its full meaning? In the first 
place, the sound of the word, as mere sound, is delight- 
ful and strengthening; it is like some of the violin 
notes of Sarasate, a jo}^ to the ear in itself. Entirel}^ 
apart from the harmony he was producing, Sarasate 
would breathe out a note so pure, so mild, so tender, 
that it would pass through your being as the beaut^^ of 
the Bay of Naples. "Pure," "pure," it is, indeed, a rare 
sounding word — a choice note from the violin of lan- 
guage. Pass we to its ph3^sical associations — pure 
air — pure Avater — pure sky. We begin to cross the 
threshold of its meaning. Air is pure when it is 
itself alone ; water is pure when it is itself alone ; the 
sky is pure when, with no admixture, it gives you 
back the blue of the sunlight. As we take one further 
step into the meaning of this rare word, we find that 
the leSvSon which its physical significance should teach 
us is well nigh lost. We find that men have seized 
upon a half truth contained in its ph^^sical application 
and forgotten the other half. Alas, as is most always 
the case at such times, the half forgotten is the more 
important of the two. I said air is pure when it is 
itself alone — the "alone" is looked at, but the "itself" 

83 



is neglected. How great a misfortune has befallen, 
how great a truth. Purit}^ has come to mean separa- 
tion, and separation alone, as though the purit}^ of the 
air meant nothing but its isolation, its aloofness from 
ever^-thing else, as though the purit}' of water meant 
nothing but its freedom from pollution. Why have 
we any care for the purity of water, or of air? Soleh^ 
that their properties, all of them, ma^- work unhin- 
dered. Why, after long cloudiness, do we wish the 
clouds awa}' — simply to separate them from the sky, 
or the sk}^ from them? No, indeed; it is that the posi- 
tive glor}^ of the heavens may over-arch us once again. 
How great a misfortune, I repeat, has fallen upon man- 
kind by a mistaken conception of purity — this nega- 
tive conception of separation ! Consider the thousands 
in past and present times wdiose lives of mistaken dut}- 
w^ere seclusion, isolation, separation from the world — 
a world Avhich was all the time God's world, calling 
for reverence, love, joy and service. It is as though 
you should enclose pure water, pure air, pure sunlight 
forever in vessels and between four walls. 

But let none of us suppose that, with the closing of 
the monasteries and the habitations of the nuns this 
error has been corrected. A searching personal ques- 
tion addresses itself to us : Is our conception of purit}^ 
mere separation from sin? Have we no larger idea of 
purity than the negative one of isolation? Do we con- 
tent ourselves with pointing out the bad things which 
w^e have not done? Who is the pure man? Consider 
him in his body — that marvelous temple of the spirit. 
There is no taint of disease, the death-working germs 

84 



are absent. Is this the pure body? No ; in that body 
the healthful blood is coursing, urged by the vigorous 
pulsing of the heart, the lungs are expanding to the 
sweet, strong air, the muscles are knotting themselves 
for action, that body is alive in every part, and its 
purity is its life. But man is more than body, he is 
also mind] and who is this pure-minded man — his 
imaginations, his thoughts are removed from evil — yes, 
indeed, but is that all? No, his imaginations are 
of the beautiful, of the S3mipathetic, of the helpful; 
his thoughts are of the true and of the ways by which 
to give that truth expression, hfs mind is alive in all 
its parts and its purit^^ its stainlessness is its life. But 
body and mind do not compass the measure of man — 
man is also heart, and as he is in his heart so is he in his 
body and his mind — a pure-hearted man is altogether 
pure. When we attempt to apply the negative con- 
ception of purity to the human heart, to the affections, 
we realize, as perhaps nowhere else, its utter insuf- 
ficienc3^ Affection will have its object, from this there 
is no escape. If we cease to love evil it is that we 
may love good. Now match me this conception 
among the conceptions of men. The conception of 
the pure-hearted man — heart, mind, body, actively 
pure. 

"Blessed, indeed, are such, the pure-hearted, for 
they shall see God." 

Note the close, organic relation here between pure- 
heartedness and the beatific vision. What does our 
highest thought of God hold in it to-da}'? A holy, 
infinite consciousness. It is often a sneer of the un- 

85 



thinking that men have made their God — from the 
first rude, horrid carving on wood or stone to the Cal- 
vinistic car^'ing in theolog}'. 

If there be a God, this is precise!}' what we should 
expect. He must be to His creatures what the}' are 
capable of receiving — nothing more, nothing less. 
That men have risen to the conception of a pure, an 
activeh' pure and infinite consciousness, is in itself one 
strong evidence that there is such a supreme con- 
sciousness, who has been active in the education of 
the human race. We forget, far too often, the great 
truth here presented. You can give no man au}'- 
thing which he is not able to receive. This sounds 
most simple, yet it is a most searching reality. Until 
men had raised themselves to the conception of a holy 
God, their God was not holy; He was almighty, 
all dread, but not all pure. If now, God be a holy, 
perfect consciousness, who shall see Him? The pure- 
hearted, and they alone. This teaching may be justly 
regarded as the limitation of God's omnipresence. 
There is no irreverence in saying that God can not 
enter the circle of your consciousness, except as you 
become receptive of the good by spiritual develop- 
ment. 

You naturally ask for some confirmation of this 
teaching from daih' experience. This appeal to expe- 
rience is our constant method. Fortunateh', in the 
present instance, illustrations abound on ever}' hand. 
HoAv is a poem to enter the circle of 3'our conscious- 
ness? Some sweet, matchless, nature-verse of Words- 
worth; some melodious brook -song of Tennyson; 

86 



a thunderous line from Goethe? They are there 
upon the page, how shall they enter the circle 
of your consciousness? Is there any power in the 
heavens or on the earth that can carry them into that 
charmed circle? When you grow up to them they 
will be yours, never before. How many persons I have 
seen among the master-pieces of art in Dresden and 
in Florence who no more received the message of 
Gerard Dow, Lorraine, Ruysdael, Corregio, Murrillo, 
Raphael or Angelo, than did the buttons on their 
coats. How many men in Cincinnati get a message 
from the sun, and its accompanying hosts that sweep 
through the awful spaces? Our minds grow dizz}^ 
at the immensity and power of the message. Ah, 
the trouble is with us, not with Wordsworth, with 
us, not with Tenn3^son, with us, not with Goethe. 
May it not be that the trouble is with us, not with 
God? 

I said illustrations here are abundant. There may 
be those among our fellows who have not met Words- 
worth, or Goethe, or Raphael, yet have they perhaps 
found 3ifrie?id, some one upon whom the}^ rel}^ some 
one between whose heart and their own a constant 
affection is flowing. What does this mean? Simph^, 
that between you and 3'^our friend there are living 
points of resemblance. You touch one another; 3^ou 
are not brought together, or held together, 3'OU come 
together as like to like. This illustration, I think, best 
serves to make known the deeper truth, viz.: that all 
such resemblance is of the heait. Your hearts are 
the same, and therefore 3^ou are one. Differ widel3' in 



judgment, in experience, in attainments, if you love 
the same things you are at one. A sincere man — and 
sincerity, you know, is always of the heart — a sincere 
man goes to and fro in search of his fellow, and, be- 
cause sincere men do not abound, he makes many 
enemies and few friends. If, now, God be pure- 
hearted, is it not demonstrated that only the pure- 
hearted shall see Him? 

What now is this beatific vision? What is this sight 
of God? I said, at the beginning, that our beatitude 
was very real and very spiritual — its spirituality is the 
height of its reality, for our most real possessions are 
the most spiritual. 

In approaching the living light of our beatitude, I 
again hesitate and know not what to say. How shall 
the most spiritual of all truths be made to reveal its 
supreme reality? Aid me as I make the attempt. 

Did it never seem strange to you that men have 
located God somewhere in heaven — away off beyond 
the stars? Did it never seem strange to you that men 
should suppose a change of place would bring them to 
God? Why is God shut out from this world and kept 
at an immense distance as a king to be visited when 
we set out on what w^e call our immortal journey, for- 
getting that if there be immortality we are on that 
journey now. There is not a sadder commentary 
upon our earthly course between the cradle and the 
grave than the fact that we believe we must wait till 
it is all over before seeing God. If our earthly course 
had been a pure-hearted course we would have seen 
God throughout its entire extent. Is there anything 



in this physical world of ours that keeps God away ? 
Is He ashamed of His own mountains, His own wide, 
deep sea. His pure, sweet air, His sunlight? Is He 
ashamed of His spring-time when the dear grass puts 
forth, and the buds swell, and the warmth steals over 
all? Is He ashamed of the night-wind falling from 
the snow-clad peaks refreshing the plains? Is He 
ashamed of the moon-light that silvers the clouds and 
glides among the trees, and softens the tiger's breast 
and bathes the young birds in their sleep. Is He 
ashamed, ashamed of man, of you and of me? Per- 
haps He does not walk with us in the cool of the day, 
because He can not. Do you know whether there are 
any places among the habitations of men not fit for 
God to visit? If you would not take your sister there, 
or your innocent brother, ought God to go? And 
what are these places among the habitations of men ? 
They are the places of the vile hearted, they are 
feeble symbols of base passions. As though a change 
of sphere would bring us to God; as though this 
world were not good enough for God to walk to and 
fro in it and commune with His like, His children. 

And now let us make one nearer approach to the 
central light of our beatitude. To see God is not to 
behold Him, imaged on the retina of flesh. That see- 
ing will ?2^z^^r be had. Why then do we read "shall 
see God?" Because sight is our highest sense — mark 
my words, highest sense — and the experience which the 
pure-hearted have of God is like unto vision in its 
clearness and preciousness. 



89 



Again we ask, as always in these studies, what has 
our experience to offer respecting this teaching? We 
find it strictly confirmatory. The truths of all exist- 
ence are invisible — never imaged on the retina of 
fiesh. Who ever sslW force, which is pulsing through 
all things, large and small — force that binds all things, 
and urges all things, and is everywhere. No retina 
ever caught it, and yet, for the scientist, it is omni- 
present and omnipotent. Who ever saw conscious- 
ness — who ever saw pain, or joy, or sorrow, or 
remorse — who ever saw love, or truth, or self-sacrifice? 
You have seen your friend? Not so. Him you never 
saw — will never see; his form, that is to say, his body; 
his voice, that is to say, noise by the moving of the 
vocal cords; his touch, that is to say muscular con- 
traction, all these have wrought upon your senses 
exactly as his corpse may do. But him whom you 
loved you never saw — will never see. A person said 
to me, in 1867, I saw with the eye of flesh a plain and 
slight form, I heard with the ear of flesh a clear and 
gentle voice, I saw this form and heard this voice 
mau}^ times, the spirit I never saw till form had 
perished and voice been silenced for twenty years. 
Then I had a vision like experience of that spirit; I 
saw its worth, its perfection, and, added he, I see it 
always. Not first that which is spiritual, but that 
which is fleshly — afterward that which is spiritual. 

The pure-hearted, and they only see God. Within the 
slight frame, and behind the gentle voice was the 
spirit, as spirit forever invisible to the retina of flesh, 
yet twenty years afterward was this spirit seen in its 

90 



full glory. Upon what truth have we come in this 
searching experience. The slight form and the gentle 
voice could not declare their soul. What form shall 
God assume to make Himself known ? If the wonders 
of this universe do not declare Him, what will or can? 
Would you receive Him if He came in shape visible 
to the outward eye? Not so; that very physical 
visibility would demonstrate to you that God was not 
present. You have infinit}^ before you — is it visible, 
mirrored on the small disk of the retina ? That which 
you can see looking upward along the sky or down- 
ward through the microscope 3^ou name finite, but do 
you not always see by means of it a beyond, an in- 
finitely great and an infinitely small? Who sees this 
infinity most clearly, and realizes it as with a vision, 
like distinctness ? You have an infinite power before 
you, do you see it with the outward eye? You have 
before you an infinite order, each seed 3delding fruit 
after its kind, and all the worlds pursuing their 
appointed courses. Do you see God? Are you as my 
friend who had before him the form and the voice, but 
saw no spirit ? What shall we say of the pure-hearted 
who have, perhaps, after twice twenty years of waiting 
and upbuilding, found God here and now, seen the 
spirit of it all, and are assured that the King in His 
beauty is wnth them every day. 



91 



" Blessed are those that work peace, for they shall 
be called the children of God.'' 



"No war or battle's sound 
Was heard the world around. 

The idle spear and shield were high uphung, 
The hooked chariot stood 
Unstained with hostile blood." 

"But peaceful was the night 
Wherein the Prince of Light 
His reign of peace upon the earth began." 

"Think not that I am come to send peace on the 
earth : I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I 
came to set a man at variance against his father, and 
the daughter against her mother; and a man's foes 
shall be they of his own household." 

As we watch the unfolding of the new religion, 
especially, after it became a world-power, it seems that 
Christ described himself and his mission better than 
did Milton in his stately h3min of Nativity. In the 
name of Christ, how many wars were waged, how 
many families divided, how man}^ cruelties practiced? 
Did Christ work peace? Has Christianity been a 
peace-working religion? How strangel}' indissoluble 
the association of this idea of peace wath Christ and 

92 



with Christianity. Such association is not due to 
Christ's language about himself, or to early Christian 
literature. In the ninth chapter of Isaiah there is a 
remarkable utterance, which runs as follows: "For 
unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and 
the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his 
name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the 
Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of 
Peace." 

These words were earh^ classed among the Old 
Testament declarations that described the Messiah, 
the expected deliverer of the people, as the Prince 
of Peace. In later New Testament writings God is 
called the God ,of Peace, and Paul even commands 
peace when he says to the Colossians "let the peace 
of God dwell in your hearts." We find there that 
Christ and Christianit}' are inseparabl}^ associated with 
the idea of peace, and that this asssociation endures 
despite persecutions, divisions and wars in the name 
of the Prince of Peace. Let us say that this is the 
indestructible ideal toward which men have been 
lifting their worn faces as the}' have struggled on in 
the tempest. Sometimes this ideal has been revealed 
in something like its matchless reality, and the toilers 
have been refreshed. It was once my fortune to ride 
through southern Ireland ; starting from Macrome 
early in the morning I rode the entire day, and ni}' 
course lay through a land of complete desolation. 
There was silence, but no peace. Nature was dead, 
and not a trace of her lovliness remained. To ride 
many days through such dreariness would endanger 

93 



the mind. Late in the afternoon the oppression 
threatened to become unbearable with the approach 
of night, but I noticed that my path widened some- 
what, and not far beyond I saw a bend of the way. 
Hastening on I turned and entered an abode of per- 
fect peace — I was at Glengariff, ai the head of Bantry 
Bay. The opening waters of ocean disclosed the sun just 
sinking into their depths, and the long, red light rose 
and fell with the stirring of the sea. Trees were on 
either side of me, with a foliage that was perfect in 
color and texture, the grass partook of this rich- 
ness and invited to rest. Nowhere in the world is 
the soothing power of the color green disclosed 
as in southern Ireland. Drummond has spoken of 
a natural law in the spiritual world, let us learn that 
there is a spiritual message in the natural world. On 
the morrow I was to ride again through scenes as 
desolate as those that lay behind me, but I would ride 
refreshed, I had rested in the abode of peace. 

Blessed are they that ivoi'k peace, for they shall be 
called the children of God." Blessedness — we have 
not, I trust, forgotten its meaning. It is the joy that 
accompanies the belief that our best selves are being 
realized. For this blessedness we should work peace, 
peace within and peace without, then we shall be 
called children of God, that is, we shall be recognized 
as His children, being such, we shall be called such. 
IvCt us now endeavor to catch some glimpse of the 
reality which all citizens of the heavenly kingdom are 
accomplishing, are working, and must work. The 
true synonym for peace is unity ; not rest, or repose. 

94 



A land that is at peace is not an idle land, a land 
asleep, it is a land of peaceful activity. A man who 
is at peace with himself is not a man buried in slum- 
ber; he is a man harmoniously, peacefully active. I 
say the synonym for peace is unity, and when we con- 
sider what unity necessarily involves, we reach the 
inner meaning of peace. Unity can exist only where 
there is variety and differeyice. There can be unity in 
this class, because there is abundant variety in the class. 
If you were all Methodists, or all Baptists, believing 
exactly the same things, in exactly the same way, and 
to exactly the same degree, you would present a fine 
array of uyiits, without a vestige of imity. The drear- 
iness of my ride through Southern Ireland was be- 
cause the country was a unit. The peace at Glengariff 
was due to the interblending variety — sea, and rock, 
and grass, and trees, and sky, clouds and sun, were 
there, therefore, unity — peace — was possible. It is, 
indeed, strange that a lesson so plain as this is so 
slowly learned. Peace demands for itself difference 
and disagreement. Instead, therefore, of endeavoring 
to make all people think as we do, and to copy our 
example, we should aim at the fullest development of 
their individiiality. We should see to it, as far as lies 
in our power, that they do not think as we do, but 
they think for themselves — each for himself. Observe 
the character this calls for in him who works peace. 
I name it the impersonal character, perhaps I should 
say the non-personal character. The character I am 
now endeavoring to present is not lacking in person- 
ality, but is entirely lacking in the desire to force that 

95 



personalit}^ against the world. Midas was reported to 
have had the golden touch ; evers'thing, bread, wine, 
cakes, when taken up b}^ him became gold, and he 
was in sure way to die of too much gold (as many 
have died since his day). Many people, I had well-nigh 
said most people, have the ^-^//-touch ; everything with 
which the3^ come into contact is changed into a gar- 
ment, or a ring, or a trinket, or a trumpet, for the dis- 
play of self. I certainh' have heard of, and, at times, 
I fanc}^ I have seen, men, who used Jesus of Nazareth, 
and the invisible God, and the hour of pra3xr, for 
their own embellishment. I have seen men use the 
cause of education for their own glory, and I have 
thought that some of them were afflicted Avith the 
Midas self-touch, so that everything upon which the}' 
even so much as looked gave back their names in 
large letters, obscuring the noble cause. These 
men can not work peace. Those who work peace 
strive with all their powers to develop others, to make 
them realize their own best selves. 

And peace demands variet}^ and disagreement. How 
much the kingdom of Heaven and the reign of the 
God of Peace would have been hastened had the Chris- 
tian world learned this lesson in the earlier centuries. 
The attempt would not have been made to burn one 
creed into men, or pour it in melted lead down their 
throats, or tattoo it into them with the Iron Virgin of 
Nuremberg. Consider the bearing of this truth upon 
the attempt at a congress of the churches of Christen- 
dom. It is proposed to write a creed for the church 
universal, and it is expected by elimination of denomi- 

96 



national differences to secure church unity, church 
peace. A more hopeless endeavor could not, in ni}- 
opinion, be endeavored. If the church Solons could 
write such a creed, and hang up one over the pulpit of 
each church in Christendom, there would be no more 
church unit}' than in a row of suspended peas. Let 
each church be itself — true to the convictions which 
gave it origin ; then there may be peace among the 
churches, unity in Christendom. 

But 3'ou ask, are we to understand that difference 
and disagreement are peace; if so, 3'ou would sa}', the 
world must have a great deal of peace. I have not said 
that difference and disagreement are peace, I have 
said that there can be no peace without them, they 
are the materials out of which peace must be made, 
if you will not allow them to exist, you can not work 
peace. Would you select from a Beethoven symphony 
the one note or strain you like best, and blot out the 
others? Wh}' not? The sj-mphou}-, with its unity, 
harmou}', would be destro^^ed. Yes, indeed, and so 
will any peace you tr\' to effect, if you blot out 
differences and key everj'body to your note. What a 
world it would be — one note sounding evers'where all 
the time ! But you press for an answer. Since differ- 
ence and disagreement are not peace, 3'et necessan^ to 
it, what is the source of peace, and how are difference 
and disagreement unified in peace f Peace is made by 
an infomning spirit. Illustrations are abundant. The 
spirit of Beethoven per\-ades, unifies the infinite 
variet}' of his music. M3' own ear is the least trained 
in musical matters, but I have recognized that might}' 

97 



soul, tender as a lover and stormier than the sea, over 
and over again, when I did not know that he was 
coming before me. Beethoven is in his music, and so 
it has unity. After seeing the touch of Murillo, I 
knew him from afar, as I entered a strange gallery; 
DaVinci, Angelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, Milton, Words- 
worth, Tennyson, Browning, how wide the variety, 
how great the difference in the subjects with which 
each dealt, 3^et the informing spirit of each gave 
unity to all. But we need not go so far afield. In the 
Spring of 1891 an immense audience assembled in the 
Pike Opera House ; young and old and middle aged 
were there, men and women were there, most varied 
nationalities were represented there, differences mul- 
tiplied a thousand fold were there, and little by little, 
utterance by utterance, the orator unified them, his 
speech informed them, and it was as though he 
addressed one human race. Such is the unifying, 
harmonizing power of the true orator. 

Prior to our civil war we had variety, difference, 
but very little unity, and no true peace. The moment- 
ous question of that dread time was whether an in- 
forming spirit would bind State to State and send a 
united North against an already united South. There 
was such a spirit of patriotism, and an arni}^ was 
created from the most diverse classes and conditions 
of men. Untrained, undisciplined, ignorant of the 
smell of powder or sound of shell, these men became 
one, and opened, at fearful cost, a broad highway for 
peace. The North saw the South in its own far away 
and peculiar land, and understood it as never before ; 

98 



the South met the North and learned that beyond the 
line there were also men, so place was given for the 
unifying forces that work peace — the silent forces of 
reason and affection. 

Have we yet any glimpse of the wondrous ideal ? 
A peaceful home. Who has seen it ? Husband and 
wife, parents and children, diversity of sex, age, 
temperament, endowment, taste ; a peaceful home 
where utmost variety is blended in one whole by 
the informing spirit of affection. 

Blessed indeed are they that work peace. How 
magnificent this ideal — peace. Consider it as realized 
in the individual man, the proper harmony of his 
varied powers by an informing spirit. In my case 
yonder stands a marvel of the French mechanician's 
art — an enlarged half of the human brain. I could 
take this half brain to pieces before you and the dis- 
tinct parts would fill my table top, yet this is only the 
gross, coarse structure of the brain. I could select 
one fiber of the countless thousands, and b^^ the 
microscope's piercing eye reveal its separate parts of 
central thread (itself composed of minutest fibrillse), 
the soft substance which envelopes it, and then 
the surrounding sheath. I could show you cells in 
number apparently as countless as the sea-sands, each 
with its distinctive parts. This brain, so varied in parts 
and diverse in arrangement, is the source of an inform- 
ing, unifying power, that prevades the entire body and 
makes it one. The healthy brain is the peace of the 
body. Blessed are they that work such peace. How 
much knowledge, how much courage, how much reso- 

99 



lutioii, how much industr^^ how much patience, go to 
the establishment of this physical peace. 

The mind, with its sensations and their innumerable 
variations, its recollections, its imaginings, its thoughts. 
What gives true peace to the human mind? The in- 
forming spirit of truth. Let not ni}^ sensations 
deceive me, ni}^ recollections mislead me, mj^ imagin- 
ings be baseless, or m^^ thoughts unverified; there 
is no peace of mind except b}' the informing spirit of 
love for truth. 

Blessed are they that work this peace. Blessed are 
the teachers and students from the beginning of our 
race to the end of it, who will have the truth, 
nothing but the truth, and who work the peace which 
truth alone can give. How much heroism of self- 
denial goes to the working of this peace ? 

Last, highest, deepest, for which all else has being 
— the emotional life of man. Behold the variet^^ of 
this life — love, hope, fear, ambition, pride, jealousy, 
joy, sorrow, anguish, indignation, anger, rage, anticipa- 
tion, surprise, delight, wonder, awe, reverence, satis- 
faction, contentment, and their opposites, benevolence, 
gratitude, malevolence, ingratitude, heart-lust, bitter- 
ness, hatred, and alone b}' itself, reinorse. There is no 
need that I continue this naming of our emotions, 
each of which has its shades of coloring and inten- 
sity. How can there be peace for such a being? 
Lightning and whirlwind, and tempest there m.ay 
well be. Peace — peace wuthin the human soul? Yes, 
the peace of God, that passeth understanding; and by 
what informing spirit ? The spirit of these beatitudes. 

100 



You never can unify man's awful nature with the 
unit}' of peace, except by the spirit of these beatitudes. 
Consider such a being as I have described unified, 
put at peace by pure-heartedness, gentleness, a hunger 
and thirst for righteousness. Is anything plainer or 
truer than that here is the secret of man's peace? Is 
he pure-hearted? Then let his senses have their play, 
let his tongue taste, his hand handle, his ear hear, and 
his e}^ see, there will be the unity and the peace of 
purity in all his sensation life. You can not break 
him into discord b}' sights or sounds, or tastes. Is he 
pure-hearted? Then let his recollections come and go, 
let fever bring back the long-forgotten past, theunit}- and 
the peace of purity- will be over all. Is he pure-hearted? 
Then let him surrender to the most luxuriant imagina- 
tion of which he is capable, the pictures of his com-, 
bining will be new creations unified in their infinite 
variety b}' the peace of purity. When we enter the 
sacred place of man's emotions, w^e find a demonstra- 
tion of the truth I am now enforcing. He is seen, 
known to be the prey of ever}' gust of feeling, a creature 
of discord and war, unless put at peace with himself 
b}' the spirit which pervades these beatitudes. Who is 
the man who can endure the stress and the strain of 
life, and preserve the unit}- of peace within himself? 
Is it the man of wealth, of knowledge, or of power? 
In these there lies no peace; wealth is imperiled, and 
all the discord of uncertaint}' is connected with its 
possession; knowledge faileth, its limits are fixed at 
the very places beyond which we A'earn to go ; power 
is a continiial temptation, and temptation is unrest, 

101 



discord, distress. What have we left that can never 
fail, never be taken away, msiy always increase, is ours 
to possess and to bestow? Is it not the informing, 
unif^'ing spirit of character ? 

What a picture that is — the Pharisee and the Publi- 
can. " Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men ; 
extortioners, idolators, or even as this Publican." And, 
with downcast e5'es, the Publican exclaims : "Be merci- 
ful to me, a sinner." The lesson here is simple, let us 
not learn more than Avould be taught. The man \^'ho 
possesses the inward peace of character has a right to 
thank God that he is not as other men, torn by con- 
tending passions and cleft in twain b}' sin. 

Being thus at peace with himself, man is fitted to 
work peace in the world of his influence. God is 
called the God ^of Peace, and men who work peace 
are His children in peculiar closeness of meaning. 

Consider what a universal peace on this earth would 
mean, and what it would demand. There vrould be 
no striving of man against man, but of man for man; 
no striving of nation against nation, but of nation for 
nation. Such world-peace would need for its realiza- 
tion only one condition — a universal willingness to 
abide b}" the judgments of reason and the promptings 
of affection, instead of force. Is it an unseeml}- 
thing to ask that the being who makes reason his 
boast should abide by reason ? Is it an unseemh^ 
thing to ask that the German people, whose pride is 
in the g^mmasia and universities, should learn the art 
of war no more; should be the active apostle of the 
silent forces of reason and affection? Is it an un- 

102 



seeml}' thing to ask that this people take the distin- 
guished position of a nation that works peace, that 
is above insulting and being insulted? I sometimes 
feel that such an example would convert the world, if 
by nothing else, by ver>' shame. 



103 



" Blessed are those ivho are pei^seciited foi^ righteous7iess 
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven^ 



There follow this beatitude two verses which make 
a direct application of the teaching to the disciples, 
and in so doing declare the nature of the persecution 
w^hich, when borne for righteousness sake, brings the 
kingdom of heaven. 

I, therefore, read the verses applying to the beatitude : 
"Blessed are 3^ou when men shall revile you and per- 
secute you and sa}^ all manner of evil against you 
falsely, for ni}^ sake." " Rejoice and be exceeding 
glad : for great is your reward in heaven : for so perse- 
cuted they the prophets which were before you." 

Our study is concerned with this question, what is 
the organic necessary connection between persecution 
and the joy of self-realization. Does experience 
reveal such connection? There is one fact connected 
with this teaching which, though it lies open to view, 
needs heavy emphasis. We are not told that all per- 
secution works blessedness, the joy of self-realiza- 
tion ; on the contrary, w^e are explicitly told, that only 
one kind of persecution is of this upbuilding charac- 
ter, viz. : the persecution which is due to the righteous- 
ness within us. If we are righteous, if we hunger 

104 



and thirst after righteousness, we are certain to be 
persecuted, and that persecution brings the blessedness 
attendant on self - reahzation. It is interesting to 
remember that this thought was underscored by the 
greatest of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church, 
St. Augustine, when he said: "It is not punishment 
that makes a martyr, but his cause." Augustine's 
best 3^ears as a theologian were given to warfare 
against heresies, and it became very natural for him 
to sa}- "Oh, 3^ou heretics, do not quote this eighth 
beatitude against us; you are not martyrs simply 
because you suffer, you must suffer for righteousness 
before you are martyrs; you are not suffering for 
righteousness, but for your naught}' heresies." There 
has been some activity against the heretics of late — 
not a circumstance however compared with that busy 
time between 350-430 A. D. I am afraid those good 
old times will never be repeated — nevertheless Augus- 
tine was right — it is the righteousness in a man and 
his suffering therefor that makes him a martyr and 
brings the heavenh- kingdom. We should not, how- 
ever, for one moment, suppose that we can escape the 
present application of our beatitude because heresy 
hunting has somewhat abated in ardor. 

A man can have a fad and go and flock by himself 
in a corner and be persecuted ; this will not bring the 
heavenly kingdom. A woman can espouse a cause, 
render herself intensely obnoxious, intenseh' distressing 
in her appearance, mount a platform, and rail herself 
into the notoriety of persecution; this will not pass 
her into the heavenly kingdom. There are persons of 

105 



such a cross-grain constitution that they are never 
happy unless pehed with hard words. It is not then 
because you are persecuted that you are blessed — 
but because you are persecuted for righteousness. 
After this preliminar}' and practical consideration, we 
approach our general subject, and in so doing remark 
that its central, formative truth is the necessary antag- 
onism between sin and righteousness, or speaking con- 
cretely, between the sinner and the righteous man. 
There was no truer sentence ever written than the 
following: "They that will live godly in the world 
shall suffer persecution." This, of cours, does not 
mean that persecution is arbitraril}^ inflicted upon their 
godliness, it does mean that because of the radical 
antagonism between good and evil all righteousness 
must experience the enmity of sin, a good man is 
and must be hated b}' a bad man. 

Now, the first thing that strikes a person, after hear- 
ing such a statement, is, that it is the purest sort of 
idealism; theoretically^, perhaps, true enough, but 
practically out of the question — unreal, false. A bad 
man does not hate a good man because of his goodness. 
There is just the amount of idealism in this that there 
is in all realism, and no more. You can not find an 
absolutel}^ imperfect apple, though you can come 
close to it; you can not find an absolutely imperfect 
flower, though you can come close to it. You draw 
sufficiently near the imperfect rose to detect its char- 
acteristics, and to determine their relation to the per- 
fect rose ; you see that the one must be the negation 
of the other — if they were conscious they would 

106 



necessarily antagonize each other, L^et us suppose 
that we can not find the absolutely bad man, the man 
who always hates the good man because of his good- 
ness, the man who never sees anything desirable in 
goodness, the man who never feels or has felt the 
stirrings of remorse. My experience of men is lim- 
ited, but if I were to be started with a lantern after 
the absolutely good man or absolutely bad man, I 
would begin the latter quest first, and with a 
measure of expectation. However, let us admit the 
ideal character of these ideals. Have we the bad man 
sufficiently with us to leave no doubt that when he is 
himself he hates the good man on account of his 
goodness? Have we the bad man sufficiently with us 
to leave no doubt that he is, from time to time, the 
persecutor of the good man because he hates him? Is 
there, as matter of fact, any such thing as jealousy in 
the world? Not perfect jealousy, not the supreme 
ideal of jealousy, but enough of the article for practi- 
cal purposes. Did it ever occur to you that jealousy 
very nearly rounds out the plan and dimensions of the 
bad man? The jealous man, the envious man, feels pain 
at the sight of another's superiority or success ; this pain 
is the root from which there grow, with great rapidity, 
hatred, malignity, and then a determination to ruin 
the superior. Is it true that any man ever feels pain 
at beholding another's superiority? Here we are at the 
center of the matter — another's excellence is our pain. 
Why? Because we are what we are, and not what w^e 
ought to be. We ought to rejoice in all excellence. 
Persecution stands revealed in its essential nature, as 

107 



an attack upon that which ought to be, this attack, 
as we have seen, being the resuh of pain at another's 
excellence. There is a further general characteristic 
of persecution which should be distinctly recognized ; 
it is not only an attack upon that which ought to be, 
it is a persistent attack. There is here no momentary 
outburst of passion, but a steady following through in 
a manner to injure, vex, afflict. Such following is 
monstrous, even though him whom we follow is a 
sinner. We have no more right than God has to de- 
sire the death of the sinner. Such following becomes 
appalling w^hen the one whom we pursue is right- 
eous ; to make a persistent attack upon a man 
because of his excellence, or, rather, because of the 
pain we feel at his excellence, is surely the unpar- 
donable sin, if there be one. 

This conception of persecution should, I think, be 
always before us when we read the histor}^ of what is 
known as religious persecution. In other words, we 
ought to consider that a great deal of human conduct, 
which from its outward side appears persecution, was 
from its inward side the discharge of duty. We are 
ever inclined to neglect this double-sidedness of con- 
duct. If Paul told the truth about himself, in other 
words, if he believed he was doing God service by 
hurrying Christians to prison, then was he not a 
persecutor? The historian assures us that it is ex- 
tremely difficult to determine the facts of history, 
how much more so to determine motives. From its 
inward side the amount of persecution that has 
appeared in human history is measured by the amount 

108 



of persistent following after righteous men to injure 
and afflict them, when the following was due to pain 
at their excellence. You say this will diminish very 
much the red color from the page of hivStory. What 
then? Who is under contract to make human nature 
worse than it is ? If to-day, in our midst, any can be 
found who afflict another because of the pain which 
his excellence occasions, we may rest assured that it 
was no less so in the past. We may be confident that 
not all of those who cried, "Away with Him! Crucify 
Him ! Crucify Him ! " were following the plain dictates 
of conscience. We may be certain that for some it 
was the pain of His excellence that moved their 
tongues to slander, and their hands to drive the nails. 
And here we are confronted with one of the most 
momentous facts of life : a man can conscientiously be 
the cause of suffering to others, a suffering which they 
nowise deserve, while his own moral integrity is not 
thereby sullied to the least degree, his soul being open 
to a life-long regret with the coming of fuller know- 
ledge. I do not know any approach from which the 
subject of education receives such solemn emphasis as 
from the one we are now considering. Education is 
so to equip man with regulative principles in all the 
departments of life, that when he follows his con- 
science he shall do the right thing from both sides of 
the act, the outward and the inward. 

If I have truly declared the nature of persecution, 
we are prepared to note its leading forms — these are 
three, and are clearly stated in the Bible verses I have 
read. "When men shall revile you, and persecute 

109 



you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely'' 
Abuse, violence and slander are the forms of persecu- 
tion which, when endured for righteousness sake, 
bring the blessedness of self-realization. Abuse is the 
weapon of the vulgar, and we are all, I doubt not, 
beyond its use. Violence is not good form; we do 
not now persecute by fire, or thumbscrew^s, or dungeons. 
It is possible that the world has been raised to a plain 
where the brutalit}' of brutalit}^ is understood. The 
optimist reads history as a moral advance; the pessi- 
mist as a moral decline, and if ever human judgments 
are determined b}^ temperament, these contradictory 
judgments are so determined. One thing is certain, 
the violent forms of persecution are forever past. It 
will never again be possible to consume a good man's 
body by burning fagots, but it is possible, as never 
before in the history of this world, to consume his 
body, and his reason, and his hope, by the invisible 
fires of an invisible persecution, kept alive through 
years of duration. The devil* is not dead. I wish I 
could see the signs of mortal sickness about him that 
some claim to discover. The finer forms of persecu- 
tion were not know^n in the rosy times of the fagot, 
as the finer forms of nerve agony were unknown. 
The growth of civilization, according to the medical 
men, has been accompanied by an increase of un- 
stable nerve systems, and this does not mean simply 
that there has attended upon civilization an enlarged 
possibility of suffering, it means that there has been 



"The cultured who object to the word "devil" will kindly substitute 
the term "spirit of evil." 

110 



an actual intensification of suffering — for an unstable 
nerve system is not a passive affair, it is active and 
constant torment. Unless, therefore, the heart of man 
has been changed by the process of the suns — not 
simpl}' his thoughts widened — we would not be justi- 
fied in sa34ng that persecution has abated. 

It is w^hen we consider the third form of persecution, 
keeping our eyes the while wide open, that the 
pessimist is in danger of gathering us in. The third 
form of persecution is slander. To slander is to injure 
malicioush' by spreading a false report, or one about 
which there is or can be the slightest doubt. I do not 
know of any monograph on slander, I mean from 
the side of its historical evolution, yet it certainly 
has reached scientific expression. As burglar}^ has 
evolved from the bludgeon and the knife to the delicate 
scientific appliances of the professional cracksman, so 
persecution has evolved from the coarse violence of 
hot lead to the skillful appliances of the accomplished 
slanderer. The devil, pointing with his tapering fore- 
finger to these things, ma}^ well sa}^ to the optimist: 
"I, too, have not been idle." 

The accomplished slanderer is not a courageous, 
open, respectable liar (I speak by comparison), he 
generally does his work with a half-truth upon which 
his cowardly nature rests when called to account. 
There is no need, however, to attempt to do the slan- 
derer justice. God alone can do that — a work, I sin- 
cerely hope, He will not fail to perform. 

The fundamental question connected with the last 
beatitude should now lie open to view. In what way 

HI 



is persecution for righteousness sake necessaril}^ 
related to self-realization? If our general position, as 
above expressed, be correct, we are not now concerned 
wnth the suffering which a righteous man experiences, 
but only with a particular portio7i of that suffering. 
Those Christians whom Paul imprisoned undoubtedl}^ 
suffered, and this because they were Christians, 3^et they 
were not persecuted, since Paul was not a persecutor. 
They were afflicted, but as the guilt of persecution did 
not rest upon Paul, so the distress of persecution did 
not come upon them. M3' statements undoubtedh' 
narrow the meaning of persecution; I am confident 
its meaning should be narrowed. Let us suppose that, 
as a physician, I receive a patient who relates to me 
his symptoms, and favors me with his judgment as to 
his needs. I firmly believe that I detect error in his 
relation of symptoms and in his self-prescribed reme- 
dies. He would allow himself a physical freedom 
which, I believe, w^ould cause his death. Had I the 
power, what would be my duty? If I deal wdth him 
as my firm conviction prompts, he will suffer long and 
severely. Manifestly, only one thing can prevent my 
action — the lack of power. The fact that I am wrong 
and that he is right nowise affects the situation. Sup- 
pose I were the only recognized medical authority in 
the class of diseases from which he suffers ; suppose 
I believed that this high position was justly mine — 
the result of close stud}^ and wide practice, sup- 
pose I believed that God had called me in audi- 
ble voice to this position, and given me the divine 
wisdom and the divine remedy ; how could I perse- 

112 



cute my patient by any suffering necessary to admin- 
ister the remedy? Could his suffering be called perse- 
cution, even after it had been clearly established that I 
was not summoned by God to treat such disease, and 
had misjudged the case completely? You see the 
comparison to be drawn. There is no sickness like 
the soul sickness of sin — there is no death like the 
eternal death of the soul. If to me there is committed 
from on high the unerring vision to detect this sick- 
ness and the only remedy for its overthrow, can I per- 
secute ? If you have this mortal sickness of the soul, 
and will not take the remedy, and I have both remedy 
and power, when we meet in the New Jerusalem you 
will bless me with a ceaseless blessing, and the agony 
of my red-hot pincers will be forgotten in the joy of 
everlasting deliverance. Such has been the belief of 
thousands in times past, respecting the soul-sickness 
of man and its remedy. And the bitterness to the 
student of history is due not alone to the red mark of 
sin — it is due to the awful, the inevitable slowness of 
events. There are two cries: How long, oh I^ord, 
shall the wicked prosper? How long, oh Lord, shall 
the good man err in his ignorance? 

There has been wickedness enough in the name of 
religion — there is more than enough to-day. There 
has been persecution enough for righteousness sake — 
there is more than enough to-day. Let there be just 
judgment. 

How often, how often has excellence been hated for 
the pain it caused, and persecution arisen for right- 
eousness owm sake. Such persecution is indeed the 

113 



blessedness of every heavenl}' citizen — certainly dur- 
ing his earthly journe}'. Such persecution is the sure 
evidence of his character ; if he were not righteous he 
would not be persecuted. The}- that will live godly 
in this world shall suffer persecution. 

It will be remembered that when our definition of 
blessedness was given we pointed out that this inter- 
pretation allowed the experience of blessedness in the 
midst of suffering. Blessedness is the joy that always 
attends the conviction that our best self is being real- • 
ized. When we are hated and made to suffer for the 
goodness that is within us, let us rejoice and be 
exceeding glad, let us take fresh courage and cleave 
fast to the right. Such persecution is a demonstration 
of our character, let us count it all joy that we are 
worthy such persecution. How few are worthy of it! 
How few are truly persecuted, truly hated and afflicted 
for the righteousness that is within them ! Which is 
equivalent to saying, how few are trul}^ righteous! 
This exclamation holds with respect to all the ex- 
cellencies of the heavenl}' citizen. How few are poor 
in spirit ; how few gentle ; how few heart-pure ? 

Worthy to be persecuted, worthy to be hated for 
what I am. Mark the depth of this reality. Not for 
what I have, either of knowledge, power or money, 
am I hated, but because I hold fast to mine integrity. 
May God find each of us worthy of persecution. 

And in this wise do the Beatitudes close, finishing 
a picture of character, the character of the heavenly cit- 
izen. Whether there be a continued existence for 
you and me beyond the grave, one thing is certain: 

114 



if we possess the character described in the Beatitudes 
we are worthy the name heavenly citizens, and are in 
a heavenly kingdom. The Latin Father, whom I have 
named, clearly saw that the Beatitudes describe one 
character, not eight characters. I read from his expo- 
sition of the Sermon on the Mount: 

"These are not different persons that will be differently 
blessed; it is not that one, being pure in heart, will see God; 
another, being merciful, will obtain mercy; and a third, who, 
hungering and thirsting after righteousness, will be filled. 
But these are different sides of the same character, with the 
capacities of blessedness which are linked to each, so that, 
while it is true that, because the man is pure in heart, and not 
because he is merciful, or meek, or a peacemaker, he will see 
God ; and, again, because he is merciful, and not because he 
is pure in heart, that he will obtain mercy, yet, it is the same 
person throughout to whom all the promises belong. Just as 
were it said, Happy are they that have feet, for they can walk ; 
happy are they that have tongues, for they can speak, we 
should not think of one man having a tongue, another feet, 
but only to each limb attribute its appropriate function. It 
is true, indeed, that these graces, like grapes of the same 
cluster, may ripen some earlier than others, ma3'-be some of 
them finer and fuller than others. Yet do they not the less 
hang upon the same stalk, and the same process of ripening 
is going forward in all." 



115 



The Prayei'- of Our Lord. 



How much more real is the invisible than the vis- 
ible, the intangible than the tangible, the inaudible 
than the audible. We fold around the outer world 
the color -consciousness within us, and this, with all 
its varieties of kind and shading, comes from the invis- 
ible constitution of matter and the invisible workings 
of brain. The sweetest of violin notes have their 
reality in the inaudible changes of molecules, whose 
combinations stir the air with inaudible tremors, that 
in turn carry inaudible nerve excitations to the brain. 
The thought no man seeth, the feeling no man touch- 
eth, the will no man heareth. I sometimes try to 
realize this world within a world, this city within a 
city, this man within a man. A heavenly city within 
an earthly city, heavenly citizens within earthly citi- 
zens — the glory of the Lord God shining within His 
children. 

We have drawn near these higher, these invisible 
realities through the Beatitudes. How exceeding pre- 
cious must be that invisible soul whose pure-hearted- 
ness sees God, whose gentleness possesseth the eternal 
Canaan, whose mercifulness bringeth sympathy to the 

116 



securing of justice. The heaven within the buffeted 
earth - struggler — the heaven of character, invisible, 
inaudible, intangible — forever so — yet is no reality to 
be compared with it or exchanged for it. 

Is not the hour for prayer fully come? Who, catch- 
ing, were it but a glimpse of his own best self and 
the heavenly glory thereof, could fail to pray? 

And so we pass from the Beatitudes to the Lord's 
Prayer. 

Shall we endeavor to read this prayer with our 
spirits f Fear not, the mind — reason — shall be given 
full opportunity to deal with this prayer, and with 
prayer as such. Surely, it can do us no harm, the 
heavenly citizen the meanwhile summoning us, to 
endeavor to find out what prayer is, by — praying. Is 
any one ashamed to pray? any one too cultured to 
pray? Hark! do I hear a voice saying, " For me there 
is no God. I will not, can not pray." Friend, you do 
not need to believe in God before you enter into the 
meaning of prayer. Are you sincere ; are you finite ; 
are you in trouble ; are you lonely ; are you appointed 
to die? Then can you realize what the Lord's prayer 
would be to you, if it were 3^ours. Have you any real- 
ization of those excellencies of character whose pos- 
session would declare you a citizen of the earthly 
heaven? Then you can know the meaning of prayer. 

" Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. 
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on 
earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive our 
debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring us not 
into temptation, but deliver us from the evil." 

117 



What, in thus praying, have we done? We have 
looked up — and all pra3xr is a looking up. We have 
not said or implied that God was away off yonder — in 
heaven — and we aw^ay down here on earth. Our 
Father which art in heaven, means, first of all, and 
necessarity, a looking up. And what sa3\s our experi- 
ence about this looking up? Is it healthful, helpful, 
is it necessars'? The child looks up to the parent, and 
when this is impossible, or comes to be impossible, the 
child is without a parent ; the pupil looks up to the 
teacher, and when this ceases, the teacher is dead. I 
hold it to be the first pulsation of the glorv^ of prayer 
that it is a looking up of the soul. 

Our Father. — These words imply consanguinity 
between Him to whom we pray and ourselves. I 
have used a phj^sical word for a spiritual realit3\ 
There is kinship between God and man, or man can 
not pray to God. Matthew Arnold is true in saying 
that in religion we necessarily betake ourselves to 
imager}' and to poetr3\ This does not make of re- 
ligion a fanc}' or a poem. The highest truths are 
incommunicable, except by the purest symbolism of 
art. The mission of art is indeed divine, it is not 
only to tell truth, but to tell the highest truths. The 
words " Our Father"'' symbolize the most precious con- 
ception in the possession of man. This conception is 
the kinship — kindredship between our best selves and 
the ruling power of the universe. In spiritually pray- 
ing these words, "Our Father which art in heaven," 
we have looked up and out of ourselves toward 

118 



another spirit. Prayer, therefore, in its first aspects is 
opposed to pantheism. The Pantheist does not separate 
God from the universe, and prayer is for him neces- 
sarily a turning in of the spirit upon itself, not a 
pressing up of his spirit toward another spirit, a 
higher, holier spirit, like in kind, but distinct and 
superior. 

"'Hallowed be thy nameT — What is the spiritual 
reality of this petition? We are certainly not praying 
for God. We are not asking that He be hallowed or 
made holy. The holiness of God is the heart of our 
conception of God. We can not imagine His holiness 
diminished or increased. 

"Hallowed be thy name." — We are not asking that 
the word God be made hol}^ ; this request, if it had any 
meaning, would be simply a petition against blas- 
phem3\ 

We are asking that the name, /. e., the revelation of 
Himself, which God has anywhere and everywhere 
made, shall become more and more holy to man, 
" Hallowed be th^^ name." Let, oh God, the mountains 
and the valleys be hallowed to us as declarations of 
the majesty of Thy thought and power. Let the 
starry night be hallowed unto us as the matchless 
symbolism of Thy infinity. 

Let the soaring, singing lark and the falling sparrow 
and the opening Spring and the ripening Summer be 
hallowed unto us, as tokens of Thy beauty, thy care 
and Thy faithfulness. Let the love of earthly parents 
(how pure, intense, persistent), the love of husband 

119 



and wife, the love of friend, be hallowed unto us, oh 
God, our Father, as tried revelations of Thy love. 
Let the awful sweep of human history be hallowed 
unto us, as the expression of Thy purpose, accom- 
plishing itself in the hearts and deeds of men. Let the 
good of all ages and races and climes be hallowed unto 
us Thy children, declaring each in his own language 
and in his own way, Thy perfect goodness. Let the 
man of sorrows, our Elder Brother, be hallowed unto us 
as Thy sympathy and Thy mercy. Let all the universe, 
Thy one great name, be hallowed unto us as the utmost 
communicable of Thy exhaustless Being. Oh, God, 
our Father, art thou not everywhere, where are the 
good and the great and the beautiful and the tender 
and the pure and the true ? Hallowed be they unto 
us — Thy name. 

Thy Ki7igdom Come. — Thine, indeed, Oh God, our 
Father — the kingdom of the pure-hearted, the gentle, 
the mourners, the workers of peace, the persecuted for 
righteousness sake. Let this kingdom come — but 
have we not been told that it has already come, 
that we need not wait the death transformation to 
enter as heavenl}^ citizens the kingdom of heaven? 
Has not an invisible heaven on this visible earth 
been proclaimed? Yesterday, on the street, I passed 
a blind man, blind from birth, yet the kingdom of 
light had long time come ; men had walked in this 
kingdom, and its glories had filled their journeying 
through the centuries, to him, poor man, the king- 
dom of light had never come. The kingdom of heaven 

120 



has not come to all. I have seen men during this 
week who were blind to the light of the heavenly 
kingdom, yet I know^ as you know, that there is a light 
from these beatitudes, which is better for us than the 
light of that sun. Well may we pray for the coming 
of the kingdom of heaven — its fuller coming to each 
of us — its universal coming to our fellow-men. 

" Thy will be done^ as in heaveii so on earths — Whose 
will ? The will of the Holy Being. This is the only 
will that has a right to be done, either in heaven or 
on earth. All will that is not willful is an expression 
of excellence. Will is simply the actualization of being ; 
willfulness is the attempt to actualize non-being. Will- 
fulness is always and necessarily the antagonism of 
being. A willful teacher antagonizes the being of the 
pupil, and seeks to impose on that pupil a command 
which has originated in the teachers passion or ignor- 
ance, or both. We should never mistake a strong- 
willed man for a willful man, as we continually do 
mistake a willful man for a man of strong will. Will 
as will is simply force; will as enlightened is force 
directed, guided to wise and noble choice, will as 
holy is simply the energizing of a Holy Being. 

To pray, that God's will be done on earth as in 
heaven is to pray that His being be realized on earth. 
Let me return to the illustration of teacher and pupil. 
When this relation is as it ought to be, the teacher's 
will is realized in the pupil, which is only saying the 
teacher's self is realized in the pupil. Now, it is most im- 
portant to observe that this is never accomplished by 

121 



what is known as force. Mere force never conquered a 
pupil. And by force God will never conquer man. 
There is another truth taught, as I think, by my illus- 
tration, w^hich is of equal importance. The true teach- 
er's realization of his will, that is, of himself in his 
pupil, is never the absorption or overthrow^ of his 
pupil's will, on the exact contrary, it is the strength- 
ening and development of the will of the pupil. In 
like manner, God's will done in you and in me, i. e., 
the realization of His holy nature in us, is the highest 
development of our best selves. A teacher who 
absorbs the pupil ruins the pupil, if God absorbs 
men He destroys them. 

"Th}' will be done." Most beautiful and excellent 
prayer! Thy will has declared Thy holy being in my 
bod^^ my mind, and my heart. As Thou hast expressed 
thyself b}^ me, I am truh^ Thy child, and m}^ highest 
excellence is in this, that I can will Thee over again, 
and so create what Thou, oh God, didst not and 
couldst not create — m^^ character. Realizing m}' best 
self, I realize Thee. My will — separate, strong, every 
way individual — does Thy wall because its holiness and 
glor}^ have won my love. 

" Give us, this day, our daily breads — A petition 
distinctive^ from the manward side of our relation to 
the Father. Not only so — it is a petition primarily 
touching our ph^^sical necessities. Some have restricted 
this request to the bread of the Lord's Supper, while 
others have used it in a purel}^ figurative way, as 
expressing desire for spiritual nourishment. I am not 

122 



concerned to maintain or deny either of these opin- 
ions, for I am not concerned to state exactly what was 
in the mind of Christ as He uttered these words. I 
will keep close to the ph^^sical meaning of the petition, 
not, however, for one moment impl3dng that we are 
confined to such meaning and forbidden to use these 
words in supplication for all nourishment. 

I find it a beautiful conception, this, of prayer for 
daily bread, physical nourishment, and I am especially 
glad to find the petition close joined to the one asking 
that God's will be done as in heaven so on earth. I 
never mourn over any misconception of philosophy or 
religion more sincerely than I do over the misconcep- 
tion respecting matter. If matter be not itself spirit, 
it is the dwelling place of spirit, and so far as we 
know or can infer, the eternal dwelling place of spirit. 
Not only so, the relation between matter and spirit in 
our own persons is one of reciprocal influence. We 
are so constituted that our highest intellectual and 
emotional life can not be secured without physical 
nourishment — bread — literal, physical bread. And 
yet this indisputable fact has been presented as one of 
degradation. Wholesome, pleasureable digestion has 
been a process for which thousands of professing 
Christians have felt called upon to apologize or to 
blush. And yet these same Christians would be 
obliged to acknowledge that the process of physical 
nourishment was appointed by their Lord and Maker, 
and by Him made essential — essential to the holiest 
living. When a saint has voluntarily starved himself 
to death, w^hat has become of his sainthood? To ask 

123 



aright for daily bread implies more than, perhaps, we 
fully recognize; to ask aright for dail}^ bread implies 
that we do our utmost to keep ourselves in condition 
to be nourished b}^ the bread. A man who antagonizes 
the appointed relation between his body and his mind, 
and his morals, can not rightlj^ ask for daily bread. 
Daily bread can not be given him — heap it up upon 
his platter — you have not given it to him, for he can 
not take it. 

"Give us this day our daily bread" implies that we 
have so realized or are striving so to realize God's holy 
w^ill in our bodies, that the bread will produce the 
nourishment it was designed to produce. This is what 
I call honest}^ in prayer. 

''And forgive our debts as we also have forgiven our 
debtors'' — I find ver>^ much in this petition, and sin- 
cerely hope 3^ou will share my finding. Remember, 
we have left the commentators, and are reading the 
lyord's prayer in the light of daily experience. A 
debt, a due, something owed is not to be forgiven ; it is 
to be paid, and this at the earliest possible moment. If 
the Greek word in our petition which is translated 
debt, be taken as Greek scholars authorize us to take 
it, viz.: to mean delinquenc3^ fault, sin, the situation is 
nowise changed. Fault, delinquenc}^, sin, ca7i ?iot be 
forgiven, as the word forgiven is ordinarily used. Do you 
suppose a holy God caii overlook sin, even if He were 
to try His utmost? Can he be imagined as saying, " I 
will make no account of this sin?" For God to over- 
look sin, to make any compromise with it, would be to 

124 



make himself a sinner. From this interpretation of 
our necessary conception of God there is no escape. 
What, then, is forgiveness? It is a work so magnifi- 
cent, so transcendent, that God alone can perfect it. It 
is divine love inducing the sinner to sin no more. 

" Forgive us our debts, our faults, as we also have 
forgiven our debtors." Have we any right to say to a 
man who owes us the truth and has given us a lie, I 
count it as nothing, I forgive you, never mind ? We 
have no more right to say this than God has. We 
have a right, not only so, it is our duty, to say to him, 
there is no peT-sonal question here involved, it is not 
because you have given me a falsehood that I can not 
forgive you, it is because you have lied that no one 
anywhere can regard you as not having spoken falsely. 
I forgive you, it is not between us that the falsehood 
rests. I bring you sympathy and help to speak false- 
hoods no more. What think you of this conception 
of forgiveness? It eliminates the personal element 
between sinner and sinned against, and this is the only 
thing that, in my judgment, ought ever to be elimi- 
nated. I can forgive that, I will forgive that, if I am 
great enough, because that has no place, no rightful 
place, anywhere. To suppose that sin consists in the 
relation of an act to me, is most false and pitiable. 
God should not be thought of as angry at the sinner 
because He, God, has been insulted. Who, for one 
moment, would have so low an estimate of God? 
God's anger is the opposition of His hoh^ nature to all 
wrong. One of the most powerful chapters in the 
entire Bible is the eighteenth chapter of Kzekiel. 

125 



Hear its closing words: "Repent and turn from all 
your transgressions, so iniquity shall not be your ritin. 
Cast awa}^ from 3'ou all your transgressions and make 
you a new heart and a new spirit, for wh}- will 3'ou 
die? For I have no pleasure in the death of him 
that dieth, saith the Lord God. Wherefore turn 3'our- 
selves and live 3'e." 

"And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven 
our debtors." Before we ask God's forgiveness, let us 
have bestowed the same forgiveness, in kind, that we 
ask at his hands. Let us take no pleasure in the 
death of him that dieth, no pleasure in the pain of 
him that suffereth. Let us bring a heart of loving 
forgiveness, which shall make our debtor know that 
the debt is not between him and ourselves, that we 
have gone behind it for his sake and will aid him to 
pay it to the last farthing. Such, and no other, is the 
forgiveness we have a right to ask from God. Is there 
any better forgiveness, any more worth}' the name ? 
Dare we ask a Hoh^ Being to cancel our sins? Is sin 
a matter of book-keeping? I know no blasphemy 
greater than to ask God to treat us as though we had 
not sinned. How magnificent the thought that our 
Father who is in Heaven will, for the love he bears us, 
go behind our sins and aid us to turn from transgres- 
sions and so to live. 

"'And bring us not into temptation ^ — There is a 
tempting to deceive and to ruin ; there is a tempting to 
test and to approve, of the former the devil is the 
source, of the later, God. In tempting, in being 

126 



tempted, there is no sin ; in tempting to ruin there is 
sin at its worst ; in tempting to prove there may be 
love in its full tenderness. It is interesting to observe 
the attempts that have been made to avoid the simple, 
natural meaning of this petition. There were numer- 
ous Latin copies of the Lord's prayer circulating about 
150 A. D., and most of these shaped our words as 
follows: "Suffer us not to be led into temptation," 
this because the actual leading of men into temptation 
ought not to be attributed to God. A very naive 
religious thinking this, when God had deliberately 
placed men in a world where temptation was inevitable. 
As matter of fact, this life of ours is as full of tempta- 
tions as it is of minutes, and if there be a divine 
education of the human race, it is an education by 
trial and testing. Other words of Scripture doubtless 
come to your minds at this time — " God is not tempted 
of evil, neither tempteth He any man. A man is tempted 
where he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed." 
But this is plainly the temptation unto ruin of which 
no good being is or can be guilty. The last Scripture 
sentence I read is noteworthy, since it makes plain 
what is necessary to temptation, and also shows the 
time at which sin appears. I have said that there is 
nothing wrong in being tempted ; for a temptation to 
exist there must be an uprising of desire toward the 
person or thing tempting, there must be something 
in you that goes out toward the object. This is 
nowise wrong, and would not become so even if your 
going out of desire became painfully intense. It is 
when you are drawn av/ay by a desire which you have 

127 



cherished until it became a hist, and so are enticed 
that you sin. 

Still another difficulty has been thought to be con- 
nected with the prayer that God will not bring us into 
temptation. If God may and does rightfully tempt 
us, to test and approve, wh}^ should we deprecate such 
temptation? And what shall we say of the words, 
" Count it all joy when 3^e fall into divers temptations?" 
Here again, as I think, a very small and arbitrar}^ 
measure has been resorted to to meet a difficult}^ that 
does not exist. A pett^^ distinction has been drawn 
between "being led into temptation," and being 
"tempted." "Being led into temptation" means be- 
ing brought under the power of a temptation greater 
than we can bear. This we have a right to deprecate. 
Being tempted is simply the testing above mentioned 
— against this we do not pray. 

I am sometimes disposed to believe that one of the 
strongest evidences for the divine origin of the Bible 
is its survival from wretched exegesis. "Bring us not 
into temptation." I^et us take these words in the 
plainest meaning as a petition against being tempted, 
against being tested, against being subjected to the 
trial which we will endeavor to meet when it does 
come, yet a trial which we can not but dread when 
we acknowledge an acquaintance with ourselves. 
Listen to these two prayers, and judge which of them 
is more in accord with the facts of the case : 

"Our Father, tempt us; we are ready for Thee. 
Our virtue is established. Search us out. Lay thine 
afflictive hand upon us; we are Jobs, and will stand 

128 



fast in our integrity." " Our Father, lead us not into 
temptation. We are weak, and we fear lest we fall. 
We know ourselves all too well to seek temptation. 
Yet, if Thou judgest us worth}^ to be tried, we will not 
flee the testing ; we will even count it all joy that Thou 
provest us with temptation." 

"Lead us not into temptation! " Was there ever a 
more natural prayer for a man who knows himself to 
offer. 

''But deliver us from evilT — Free us, our Father, 
from all that which ought not to be — free us from 
evil within and evil without. Let me illustrate by a 
common physical experience. For months — for years, 
a disease, with insidious but ceaseless advances, has 
been undermining the foundations of your physical 
well being, an all-pervading wretchedness has come to 
pass within you, the disorder augments, and fever, pain, 
agony, delirium, unconsciousness ensue. You awake 
more helpless than a babe ; your first consciousness is 
of distress gone, and then of the gentle stirrings of a 
new life. Not for years has such blessing been known — 
the blessing of health — oh, the luxury of the days. 
Stronger, stronger, freer from evil, and wdth the open- 
ing Spring you climb the hill-side a new man, born 
again unto unspeakable joy. What a faint, faint type 
of a soul freed from its evil — freed from the accursed 
undermining evil that spreads the wretchedness of its 
discontent over all your seeing, all your recollections, 
all your thoughts, all your feelings. Thank God if 
this discontent — discontent because you are not what 

129 



3'ou ought to be and might be — has not mounted to 
the delirium of passion, and driven 3^ou to deeds of 
violence or deceit. Delivered from all that evil — able 
to be sincere — able to love truth for its own sake, to 
love beaut}' for its own sake — able to be filled with 
sympathy' — able to rejoice in the light — able to prefer 
your integrity before all else in this universe. Who 
can state the luxurs^ of freedom from the evil that is 
within — not a passive, empt}' separation ^ but to feel, 
as you lie back in the weakness of a hard-won victory, 
the stirrings of a new life within your soul — to feel love 
for purit3^ gentleness, peace, righteousness, moving 
within you, raising 3'ou up to front the world a fresh, 
clean soul. Is //m/' worth a pra3'er? "" Deliver 21s fro7ii 
eviir 



130 



Wisdom is the recognition and loving- acceptance 
of God in law. 



Our conception of prayer is determined by our 
conception of God. Our conception of God is all 
too often determined by our surroundings. Let us 
guard against error at this initial point. It is true to 
a degree that all our conceptions are shaped by the 
times and circumstances of our lives. Had we been 
Chinese we would not have been Americans, had 
we been Unitarians we would not have been Trini- 
tarians, had we been Catholics we would not have 
been Presbyterians. For this determining influence 
of birth and environment we are not responsible. It 
is the promise and the result of all true education to 
beget culture, and culture represents the emancipa- 
tion of man, as far as he can be emancipated, from 
the undue influence of his narrow environment. Edu- 
cation widens his surroundings and makes him a 
world citizen. He becomes now, and for the first time, 
a creator of his own conceptions, a creator, that is, to 
the fullest extent of which he is capable. He never can 
create ideas, the elements of which were not furnished 
by his own experience, nevertheless, he can and does 
create. His conceptions are not formed for him. He 

131 



works over the material which comes from without, 
and is not worked over by it. This is the proper and 
inevitable effect of education. A moment's reflection 
will show that the educative process tending to such 
issue is an uneven one, uneven, I mean, so far as a 
given family, communit}^ or people ma}^ be concerned. 
To this fact we may, in large measure, trace the bitter 
disagreements in families and communities respecting 
religion, morality and politics. The younger members 
of a family are developing under circumstances very 
different from those which surrounded the early years 
of their parents. Increasing care and anxiety turned 
the intellectual activit}^ of the parents into practical 
channels, the toil of breadwinning left neither time nor 
strength for study or reflection. Not only so, this result 
happened at the most critical period of intellectual de- 
velopment, the period, viz.: of which I have spoken, 
when education would make man a creator of his own 
conceptions. The training which these parents received 
(I am supposing that it was proper training) was 
giving them the use of their minds, and in due time 
they would have become masters of their environment, 
forming their own conceptions of morality, religion 
and politics. This precisely they did become in matters 
of business and household affairs, if they rose at all 
above mediocrity and achieved any distinctive success. 
They thought for themselves in business, and while 
unable to escape from their environment here, they 
were not moulded by it into machines. They were 
often heretics in business ; in morality, religion and 
politics, however, they did not create their own con- 

132 



ceptions, but received them from the .silent influence 
of their surroundings. Now, it is most noteworthy, 
though it Hes in the very nature of the case, that they 
are more tenacious of these traditional, handed-over 
conceptions than they are of those which they formed 
for themselves in business affairs and daily life. 

You will, I think, agree that we have laid our hand 
upon the source of a large part of the turmoil in fami- 
lies and communities, respecting religion, morality and 
politics. Parents can not view with anything but 
dread what seems to them a reckless abandonment by 
their children of fundamental truths. There is, as I 
believe, but one safeguard against this deplorable situa- 
tion — it is the safeguard of education, differently con- 
ducted at or near its beginnings. The time must come 
when direct and purposed effort will be made to teach 
children the right use of reason, and to develop within 
them right feelings. 

Consider the bearing of these thoughts upon our 
present subject. I said that our conception of prayer 
was determined by our conception of God, and that 
our conception of God is all too often determined by 
our surroundings. It will, I trust, now be evident in 
what sense our conception of God must be determined 
by our surroundings, and in what sense we must be its 
creators. First of all we are human beings, and can 
have no God-idea which is extra-human. We have 
not the least concern with what other beings, above or 
below us, may or may not think of God. We are 
obliged to make our own God ; do not let me be mis- 
understood, I said our oivn God. God Himself we 

133 



do not make ; do we make the mountain or the sea ; 
do we make our ideas of mountain and sea? Are our 
ideas of mountain and sea any wise different from 
those held b}" the earth inhabitants in the da3^s of 
Homer? There are two fixed quantities in this whole 
matter; one is external, the other internal; one is the 
universe and the other is our own constitution ; these 
we do not create. The}' determine us ; 3^et out of 
them and in keeping with them we create and ought 
to create our God-ideas. This is preciseh' what sin- 
cere thinking men have done from the beginning until 
now, and they have given us, each in his time, the best 
God-idea of which they were capable. This is part of 
our heritage of our environment, which we should use 
in our creative work. Has the course of things been 
anj^wise different in science or histon,'? Science is 
man's creation of his world — his universe. What 
has he worked with in this creative undertaking? 
He has worked with his own constitution of sense and 
reason and with his environment. Did he create 
either — has he altered either b}' the least fraction? 
Yet he has created a new world for us many times 
over during the centuries. Not only so, he has created a 
world in one age which was the outright contradictory 
of the world preceding, and the equalh^ flat contra- 
dictory of the world created b}^ His enlightened suc- 
cessors. Wh}^ should w^e expect a different state of 
things with regard to religion? Do I hear some one 
answer, because God has declared Himself once for all 
in the Hoi}'' Scripture. But do 3'ou not know that the 
God-idea gathered from that Scripture was gathered 

134 



b}^ men, and by them put into the so-called creeds of 
Christendom. The Catholic Church is undeniably the 
most logical religious organization that has appeared 
in human history. That church claimed to have not 
only the inspired word of God, but an inspired inter- 
pretation of that word. Has Protestantism admitted 
that claim? It has most emphatically denied it and 
taken the consequences; that is to sa^^, taken as many 
Bibles as there were sects and theologians to interpret. 
The churches have created their own Bibles, and 
each man should be the creator of his own Bible. His 
Bible is not that printed Book any more than the 
scientist's world of Descarte's time was the world of 
Nature. His Bible is just so much of that divine 
Book as he has taken up into his mind and heart and 
made for himself He must create his own Bible ; 
without altering a word on the printed page, he must 
tell what that Book means to him. He must not allow 
minister or church or council to make his Bible, unless, 
as a sincere Catholic, he believes in the God-bestowed 
authority of that church to do such important work. 
What is true of the Bible is equally true of God. 
Shall we allow anj^ one to make our God for us? Have 
we a right to any God except the one w^e have made? 
Can we pray to some other person's God? A humble, 
pure-hearted woman kneels in prayer, the skies over 
her small horizon are very dark, the struggle of life — 
her narrow, burdened life — is becoming unbearable. 
Her pure heart cries, "help me, oh God, I perish." The 
heavens, her heavens, open and she hears a voice 
saying, "be of good cheer; I once lived through a 

135 



darker night in Gethsemane's shade ; I love you ; I 
Hft 3'ou up," and Jesus, her Jesus touches her. There 
is her creation made out of her hfe-blood, and the 
Bible, as she reads it, her Bible. Now, I say there is 
more realit}' there than in the church-goer who has 
never had a Bible or created a praj^er. Owned Bibles? 
Yes. Had a Bible? No, never. Said prayers? Yes. 
Prayed? Never. Ah, friends, all that is worth the 
doing we must do for ourselves, all the God and all 
the Bible worth having we must make for ourselves, 
make them out of the constitution of our souls and 
out of the experiences of our lives. Do you not see 
plainly the character of my present undertaking. I 
am concerned to declare that conception of God — 
that God-idea which is, as I believe, necessitated by 
our human constitution and our experience, I am not 
concerned to force this conception upon you, but to 
commend it to you as one b}^ the help of which 3^ou, 
too, may have a God — precious be^^ond expression, the 
God oi your mind and your heart and your life. 

The highest being of which we can conceive is a 
self-conscious, intelligent, and hol}^ being. It is plain 
that our God-idea should be the highest we are capable 
of forming. God is a term universally admitted to be 
the symbol of the highest. What is oicr highest? i. e., 
What is our God, not the angels' God, or the ani- 
mals' God, or the ma3^-be God, but our God, the God 
we are constrained b}^ our nature to conceive? We are 
wont to say that living matter is a higher reality than 
non-living matter, and we also say that conscious be- 
ings, even the least of them, are superior to the un- 

136 



conscious, so that the butterfl}^ is more to us than 
the fixed plant on which it alights. Why is man the 
chiefest of beings on this earth ? Because in him con- 
sciousness is at its highest. Reason, conscience, voli- 
tion, and nothing else, engirdle the world for him and 
trace the unerring courses of the stars. 

Now, it is a stultification of our reason to sa^^ that 
oitr God is other than, and higher than, consciousness. 
For us He must mean an intelligence that knows us 
and knows the universe. We are utterh^ unable to 
conceive a being higher than self-conscious perfection. 
Remember, I am not concerned to offer proof that 
there is a God; I am deeply concerned to show what 
those ought to mean and must mean who believe there 
is a God. Mr. Herbert Spencer has taken here, as I 
think, one of the most suicidal positions possible to a 
reasoning being — and Mr. Spencer is certainh^ a man 
of large reason. He says: "It is true that we are 
totally unable to conceive of anj^ higher mode of being 
than intelligence and will." In the very next sentence 
he says: " This is not a reason for questioning its ex- 
istence — it is rather the reverse. Does it not follow 
that the ultimate cause can not, in any respect, be 
conceived b}^ us, because it is, in evers^ respect, 
greater than can be conceived?" 

Mr. Spencer's influence over the 3^ounger generation 
of students and readers has been larger than it is, but 
it is still large. He is the intellectual guide of many; 
there are hundreds in our countrs', to-da3^ who do not 
venture to approach God in prayer as a personal, self- 
conscious being, because Mr. Spencer has made them 

137 



believe that to do so would belittle God, who is vastly 
greater than our necessary conception of Him. A 
person must journey a long distance through the 
devious paths of controversy to meet such abuse of 
reason as presents itself in the teaching above set 
forth. If reason is to be our guide, shall we follow 
reason? If reason is to be our only guide, what other 
guide shall we follow? If I say, because I can not 
help myself, that all metals have a certain atomic 
weight, ductility, and luster, what would you do with 
a chemist who should stand up in front of me and reply, 
"It is true you can not think of metals in any other 
way, but you must not call metals ductile, lustrous, and 
of a certain weight, because j^ou do not know, and 
can not know% how much inoi^e they are?" You would 
deposit that chemist in lyongview, and you would not 
let him come out until he was intelligent enough to 
sign this paper: " I hereby acknowledge that I was a 
fool. Reason being my sole guide, I will hereafter 
follow reason alone, and the metal I believe in shall be 
the metal my reason shuts me up to." 

I say, therefore, that reason, in its strictest exercise, 
brings us, if we are to pray at all, to a self-conscious, 
holy intelligence. It is none of our intellectual busi- 
ness what else God may be, or has been, or is, or will 
be ; for us He is self-conscious and holy. This is so 
far a justification and appropriation by reason of the 
words " Our Father," which begin the Lord's prayer. 
Our God is like us, and we do not propose to have 
any other beings God — animal, devil, angel, or arch- 
angel. Since our idea of prayer must be determined 

138 



by our idea of God, and since our idea of God inevi- 
tably contains within it holy intelligence, we ask 
whether there are other determining thoughts growing 
out of such God-idea, and what is their shaping force 
upon an understanding of prayer? There are such 
ideas, and the most fundamental of them is the idea of 
Laiv. If such a being exist as our conception of God 
demands, there has never been a single law made by 
God, and there never can be a law made by God, neither 
can a law be changed to so much as a fraction by the 
omnipotence of God. Prayer, therefore, need not 
address itself to the changing of law. I fear this will 
seem very shocking doctrine and thoroughly destruc- 
tive of prayer. I have said, prayer, therefore, need 
not address itself to the changing of law. Let me 
read my sentence in this wise: Prayer, therefore, need 
not address itself to the changing of God. The two 
sentences mean exactly the same thing for a believer 
in God. God is the best being — what would become 
of Him if He were to change His nature in the slight- 
est degree? Think of the monstrosity of a prayer that 
ivishes to change God — to say nothing of the foolish- 
ishness of such a prayer. 

Let us test this as we do all our shocking statements 
by experience. Let us say to a bar of iron, "I want 
you to hold fast your molecular tenacity while I am 
using you to couple a train of cars; but when you 
fall on my feet I want you to become feathers." Let 
us say that to the all-knowing intelligence from whom 
iron came, as the Christian believes. Nay, let us 
wring our hands and get down on our knees and offer 

139 



such petition — we will have insulted God in our pra^^er. 
If God be the author of iron, iron is a transcript of 
the thought of God; and what we call the laws of iron, 
i. e., ways in which it persistently manifests itself to us, 
are ways of the divine being, and who wishes by his 
pra3^er, or ought to wish, to remake God? 

A right conception of law springs from a right con- 
ception of God, and a right conception of law glorifies 
God and glorifies prayer, and deepens the meaning of 
life. I say a right conception of law glorifies God. 
Law — physical, intellectual, moral — is an expression of 
God's being. He did not determine to have a deca- 
logue, and so make it out of nothing. If the ten com- 
mandments came from God — the}^ came from God — 
the}^ are revelations of His being. If this universe 
came from God, it came from God, and is a transcript 
of His nature. It is only when we extend our 
necessary conception of God to His world and 
His laws that we glorify him with the highest 
thought of which we are capable. It is in this 
way, and in this way onl}^ that all the attributes 
we ascribe to God are purified of their grossness. 
Divine anger is not some one angry, some one raging 
furiously against a finite creature who has dared to 
disobey the Almighty's commands. Is not your God 
above such pitiable business? Divine anger is the 
necessary opposition between right and wrong — a 
right being and a wrong being, a holy being and an 
unholy being. Is not that anger enough? The other 
can expend itself and have done, this can never ex- 
pend itself and never have done. There is only one 

140 



way to be reconciled with God, and that is to stop 
sinning. 

Divine punishment is, by the conception of God we 
are here urging, entirely freed from arbitrary character, 
and raised to divine dignity as God realizing himself; 
infinite blessing, if we will have it so, infinite pain, if 
we will not. Why do we so continually fail to realize 
what it means to say God is the source of all? We 
thrust our hand into the fire and pray to escape the 
consequences. That fire is God. How beneficent, how 
comforting, how strengthening, when used rightly. And 
what does this mean — when used rightly? It means 
used as God, not as God ordered, comma?ided, but as 
God. Ah, the God-idea, even as we finite creatures are 
compelled to make it, is large enough to keep us 
thinking and feeling to our utmost. The fire is God 
— His thought — therefore, God, His thought, there- 
fore, the best. What a world this is, if it be indeed 
the world of God, as the Christian believes? With 
what grand solemnity is life filled by this conception 
— a human being entered on an endless career as 
the child of God in a universe of God ! The laws of 
nature are modes of an all-wise and an all-holy being, 
better laws could not have been, can not be, for they 
are God. Behold how this conception of divine law 
rectifies and solemnizes the conception of punishment 
here and hereafter. Behold how it fills out with mean- 
ing these words from the mighty chapter of Ezekiel : 
" Cast away from you all your transgressions, and make 
you a new heart and a new spirit, for why will ye die? " 
The entire universe of God as God, is crying out by 

141 



everyone of its laws, great and small, "Turn ye! Turn 
ye ! Why will 3'e die?" Punishment — as though God 
attaches a punishment to 3-our act which He could 
withhold! It is His glor}' and His omnipotence that 
He can not withhold penalt}-. I, a finite, imperfect 
being, may make a law and tie on a penalt}' — this pen- 
alty I can untie, and will, perhaps, if you pa}- me 
enough. He, the infinite, makes no law — He is law ; 
He attaches no penalt}' — is penalt3\ 

If we believe in immortality' we believe that we have 
alread}^ entered upon an eternal living, or an eternal 
dying. Endless punishment — can that be ? Endless 
sinning — can that be ? If the latter, then the former. 
As long as you hold 3'our hand in the fire the hand 
will burn — one hour, a month, a 3'ear, ten million 3'ears; 
wherever, and as long as, 3'ou sin 3'ou will suffer. 

Will 3'ou make for ^-ourselves, as 3'our God, a hoi}', 
self-conscious intelligence? Will you make, as A'our 
God, a Heavenly Fatherf Will 3'ou find in His perfect 
nature the source of all that is ? Will 3'ou not then 
say that all that is ought to be since it also is God — 
His thought, His power. His wisdom? Will you not 
sa3' all that is must be, sin alone excepted? 



142 



Wisdom is the recognition and loving acceptance 
of God in laiv. 



Angelo had finished, upon the ceiling of the Sistine 
Chapel his picture of Eve. He was looking at his own 
creation. Clambering up upon the scaffolding came 
an art critic. In the audacity of his littleness he drew 
near and said: "Change the position of that arm; 
deepen this shading; give another color to the eyes." 
Still looking upon his handiwork, Angelo said: "I 
can not." "Oh, 3^es, it is eas}- I will show 3'ou how," 
replied the critic, his audacity being now full grown. 
Then the artist arose from the plank on which he had 
been hdng, and wdth lightning in his eyes and thunder 
in his voice, he drave the little fellow out of his pres- 
ence. The Italian night was falling as Angelo lay 
dowm and looked again upon the work of his hands ; 
the most beautiful, the most perfect, woman it has 
been given any man to symbolize. 

"Oh, God," he cried; "the}' would have me change 
the form and the color, but I can not. Knowest thou 
not, oh God, that I can not change this S3'mbol of Th}- 
creative work. It is myself, my mind and my heart 
and m}' hand are there. Had I more to give, or better 
to give, thou knowest I w^ould give it. My best is 

143 



there." Angelo, rugged, gloomy man, towers up 
among the great. What would it have been for him 
to change that creation on the ceiling? It would 
have been the degradation of falsehood. To his own 
self he could not be true and alter one particle of his 
work. Let us sa}^ that Angelo was, as many have 
named him, the supreme artist. Is it not clear that by 
just so much as he w^as more than others, it was impos- 
sible, literalh' impossible, for him to change his crea- 
tion? He, at his best, produced the best ; can the best 
be changed ? So I have sought to identify God wdth 
his works. Angelo was apart and distinct from the 
woman, and yet so truly was she his ver}^ self, that he 
could not change her without self-destruction. I have 
said, with the utmost emphasis of which I am capable, 
that the highest conception of God we can form is of 
self-conscious and holy intelligence. Here is no pan- 
theism. The stone is not self-conscious or intelligent, 
neither is iron, neither is that Kve who looks dowm the 
centuries from the Sistine ceiling. But as we know 
that glorious woman could not have been changed by 
Angelo, and can not be changed by any man, because 
she is the heart and mind of the greatest artist, so we 
know that iron and stone and star can not be changed, 
because they are the thought of God. A greater than 
Angelo might change his Eve, and a greater than God 
might change His iron or His world. 

I am, indeed, deeply anxious that this conception of 
God and the consequent conception of law should com- 
mend themselves to your judgment. It is often a 
reproach against the Christian God -idea that it is 

144 



nothing but that of an enlarged man. A man's God 
must, indeed, be his God, not such as a different order 
of being would make, therefore have I pled so earnestly 
that we acknowledge our obligation to think as men, 
as the constitution of our being makes necessar>^ Let 
us then see well to it that in forming our idea of God 
we bring forth the best of which we are capable. To 
show that it is this alone I have sought, I will recur 
to the earthly parental relation. What do we mean 
by a willful parent ? We mean one who speaks in this 
wise : "/ told you to do that — 3^ou disobeyed me — how 
dared you disobey me ; understand henceforth, my 
will is your law ; break it and I will whip you into 
subjection." What is the radical defect here? It is 
the blind assertion of the pure, naked self. The 
parents self is insulted by the child's disobedience. 
What, on the other hand, do we mean by a just and 
loving parent? We mean one who speaks in this 
wise: "My child, I require you to do this thing 
because I love you so much." The child answers, 
"Father, how can 3^ou love me when you pain me?" 
And the father says, " It is not I who pain 3'ou, it is 
you who pain yourself, I have simpl^^ told you what 
must be done if you would live and not suffer ; it is 
because I know this, and because I love you so much 
that I compel your obedience." Consider carefully 
the full excellence of this parent ; it is the utter 
absence of that blind assertion of pure, naked self 
— the self of the parent is swallowed up by truth and 
love. This parent has seen and stated the immutable 
modes of his child's being. It is not against the 

145 



parent that the child has sinned, but against himself — 
he has thrust his hand into fire. Am I not seeking the 
purest and truest conceptions? Is not the beauty, is not 
the life of the parental relation found in that love which 
puts self out of sight, out of thought, and discerning 
the being of the child, aids in its realization ? But the 
earthl}^ parent is not the soiu^ce of law, he is its dis- 
coverer. Rise now to the conception of a heavenly 
parent, a pei^fect parent. He is the source of law — 
He is not its discover or its maker. He is its revealer. 
As our nature enlarges by the growth of knowledge 
and the deepening of feeling, self in its hideous naked- 
ness is no more; a gloriful self emerges whose sole 
mission is to realize God. 

Can 3^ou name a grander conception in the posses- 
sion of the human mind than this of a divine uni- 
verse? God manifested evers^where in power, in wis- 
dom, and in love. This the Christian professes to 
believe — let him enter into the full measure of his 
belief. Let him sa}-, without hesitation, Thou art from 
everlasting to everlasting God — unchangeable, because 
the best, and all Th}' works are Thee. Law, therefore, 
whether ph^'sical, intellectual, or moral, is a transcript 
of the nature of God, and an}- prayer that prays for 
the abrogation of law prays for the abrogation of God. 
To say that God can not change His law is the same 
as to say that God can not change himself. To say 
that God can not forgive sin, in the sense of disregard- 
ing it, or in the sense of withholding its consequences, 
is the same as to sa}^ that God can not forswear him- 
self. And now I have drawn near what is regarded as 

146 



the cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith, the aton- 
ing work of Christ. It is believed by Christians that 
God for Christ's sake forgives men their sins. Let 
it be clearly understood that I am not here for the 
purpose of urging this doctrine upon any one of you. 
I am concerned to show what, in my opinion, this 
teaching should mean for all who accept it. Ever}' 
one before me knows full well that the doctrine of the 
atonement, as it is called, has subjected Christianity to 
more severe criticism than any other in the creed. 
That God should be represented as forgiving a sinner 
because an innocent being voluntaril}^ endured cruci- 
fixion is to man}' sincere men a slander upon the 
Almight}'. To say that an innocent being can take 
upon himself a sinner's sin appears to man}' an out- 
right falsehood. Only a sinner is a sinner, and no one 
could get his sins if he tried — the}' are the individual's 
personal property, and so personal that he could not 
give them up to another by any conceivable endeavor. 
But there is said to be a further difficulty of equal, or 
even greater, magnitude. If any innocent being could 
carry sins without being a sinner he has no right to do 
so. To regard an innocent being as guilty is itself the 
height of iniquity. To represent God as appeased by 
innocent blood, and willing to save only those who 
believe this, is judged by many sincere minds to be 
blasphemy. 

I have endeavored to state the objectors position in 
the strongest possible manner, and I ask, with all 
earnestness, has the believer in the atonement no other 
reply than is covered by the words, " You must have 

147 



faith. Pray God that He will give 3^ou faith in spite 
of your reason." Are we to be forever told that faith, 
which is one of the commonest realities of daily life, 
a realit}^ without which human affairs could not con- 
tinue one hour, is the contradiction of reason? Is man 
a being of such inner schism that one part of his 
nature impels in one direction and the other in the 
opposite direction ? If the Christian religion has less 
hold to-da}' upon the thinking minds of the world than 
in previous 3'ears, is it soleh^ because thought and cul- 
ture and learning are anti-Christian? Is the honest 
training of a man's mind the sure source of unbelief? 
Have men grown indifferent, as the minister com- 
plains, to moral and religious questions? Do we not 
know that there was never a time when these subjects 
were more earnestl}- inquired into than at the present 
da}^? Infinite pains have been taken, are being taken, 
to get at the facts respecting man's moral and religious 
history, that light may be thrown on his moral and 
religious nature. And how his consciousness has been 
studied, is being studied, in all its phases, from the 
cradle to the grave. How facts, undreamed of by the 
wildest imagination, are laid open to view, and marvels 
presented to our vision that were laughed to scorn by 
men of science a few years since. If Christianity 
turn her back upon facts, she is doomed. If Chris- 
tianit}^ is to be explained by its histor>% and not 
by its possession of eternal truths — truths that 
no after-facts can reverse — let Christianity go — 
its day is over. Consider the immense extension of 
mathematical science since the days of the Greeks. 

148 



So vast and thorough has been this extension as to 
convince man^^ of our greatest mathematicians that 
their science is the key to the constitution of matter, 
and that all knowledge is in essence mathematical. 
Consider, and it is surely a momentous consideration, 
that not one principle discovered by the Greek mathe- 
maticians has been reversed by all this subsequent 
advance. Does not our recent study of the Beatitudes 
assure us that their truths are be3^ond the corroding 
touch of time? Will thej^ ever grow old? Do they 
not mean more to us as our experience broadens and 
deepens? I plead for the application of Christianity 
to the human life of this centur}- I plead for the 
application of Christianity to every fact in our mani- 
fold nature ; I plead for a rational Christianity^ ; I plead 
for a religious feeling so powerful that it shall make of 
us all citizens of a heavenly kingdom here in this 
university and in the life that now is. I know that 
men are held to right courses b}- their aifections, and I 
know that these affections must be nourished by truth. 
Return we now to what is called the atoning work of 
Christ in the light of our conception of God and law. 
Let us ask, with all earnestness and openness of spirit, 
whether forgiveness of sins for Christ's sake does not 
receive a new and deep meaning from our previous 
thinking? 

God is the Best Being, therefore His laws are Him- 
self, therefore they must prevail, must be obeyed or 
disaster follow. Man has broken these laws, has 
opposed the Best Being, therefore he has suffered, 
suffers, and will suffer until he returns to God, i. <?., to 

149 



the Best. God is love. Love is the glory of perfection. 
As we become better we love more — love all that is. 
God loves men who have sinned; their sin consists in 
turning away from the Best, therefore they suffer. 
Christ is the expression of this love of God for the 
sinner. Behold the depth of meaning in these words 
for the sincere believer. Christ raised up sinning 
humanity. How? B}^ His obedience. Obedience to 
what? To law. Whose law? The law of God. 
Christian people regard Christ as sinless. And what 
does this mean? It means that one man — for all 
Christians assert the humanit}^ of Christ — kept the 
law of God. In Christ, therefore, there is a perfected 
humanity. What, then, is salvation through Christ? 
Becoming Christlike. And this ? A return to God. 
And this ? Keeping His laws. And this ? Keeping 
God. Now, I submit that here is atonement, and that 
these words take on new meaning, "There is therefore 
now no condemnation for them that are in Christ 
Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus 
made me free from the law of sin and death." It 
follows that salvation through Christ is something 
more than joining a church, however orthodox or 
heterodox. Salvation through Christ means nothing 
else or less than so dwelling with Him that you are 
thereby enabled to do what He did — obey — keep, 
realize the being of God. Who can return to God or 
be returned to God except he first become like God ? 
God is good? The Good One? Then a return to God 
is a return to good. If Christ save men, He saves 
them by enabling them to begin to be good, and this 

150 



means to keep God's law, and this means to live in 
body, mind and soul as these are in their essential 
nature. 

I would magnify for the Christian the work of 
Christ as I would magnify the conception of God and 
His law. I do not believe that any man, woman, or 
child has a right to say I am saved by the death of 
Christ, unless by an appropriation of Christ's charac- 
ter, the life of obedience to holy law has been trul}^ 
commenced. Christianity is not a scheme for avoiding 
the consequences of sin, it is not an arrangement 
between God and Christ, by which so much innocent 
suffering is placed to the sinner's credit. How belit- 
tling such a conception? How magnificent that other 
conception of God and Christ and the rescued soul, 
which makes them all co-workers for immutable right ! 
God's forgiveness of man's sins through Christ means 
something when it signifies a deliverance from sin, 
which Christ enables man to accomplish in his own 
nature. Reflect, my friend, that no other deliverance 
is possible. God can not deliver you from sin except 
by helping you to deliver yourself For, what is sin? 
Primarily, and in essence, a state of heart. And, 
notice, always a state of heart which j/^?^ produced. If 
you did 7iot produce it, you did not sin. How, then, 
about its opposite, a state of righteousness? Who 
makes or can make that? You and you alone. You 
can not put on Christ's righteousness as a man putteth 
on a garment, you must put in Christ's righteousness 
by your own will, you must free yourself from the law 
of sin and death by obeying the law of God, which 
is life. 

151 



We have completed a careful testing of the Beati- 
tudes by our own daily experience, and have we not 
found that those utterances announced the highest 
conceivable human character ? If the heavenl}^ citizen 
is gentle, pure-hearted, a worker of peace, do you 
imagine that the redeemed man is any less? Is the 
blood of Christ to take the place with God of pure- 
heartedness ? Is the death of Christ to take the place 
with God of hunger and thirst for righteousness ? 

Grand, indeed, is that redemption of the sinner 
which results in changed affections. 

But our presentations have imperiled the miracle. 
If law, as the revelation of a Hoh' Perfect Being, be 
as unchangeable as He, what becomes of the miracle? 
It is most unfortunate that the use of the word miracle 
has been such as to fasten attention more upon the 
strangeness of an event than upon its signality. The 
miracle, as presented in the Bible, is an attestation of 
authority, and the strangeness in the event called 
miraculous, was simply one of the features about it 
which gave it this attestation-character. This is the 
real significance of the strangeness in the miracle. If 
now we accept the conception of God and of law, 
which I have endeavored to commend, there still is in 
every event a strangeness which makes it a sign of 
divine power, /. e., to say a miracle. Not one of the 
so-called familar things but leads to infinity, and is so 
inscrutable as to attest an infinite power. What 
possible difference does it make how an event called 
miraculous is produced, provided we accept its attesta- 
tion-character? Many persons have, as I believe, use- 

152 



lessly perplexed themselves about the zaav in which a 
miracle was wrought. Some have regarded it as a result 
of "a provision made in the original scheme of the 
universe, by which the occurrence was to take place at 
a given moment," others, " as the result of the inter- 
ference of some higher law with subordinate laws." 
During these Bible studies I have repeatedly had 
occasion to point out that the most important was 
neglected for the relatively unimportant. This mis- 
take again appears in the treatment of miracle — the 
most important thing in the miracle is its attestation 
of God, it is comparatively a matter of no con- 
sequence in what way the miracle was occasioned, yet, 
precisely this second consideration has been the 
weighty one with most persons. 

And now comes in full application to the present 
subject, our conception of God as infinite intelligence. 
Holding resolutely to the conviction that God, as the 
best Being, is unchangeable, and that His laws, as 
expressions of His nature, are immutable as that 
nature, we insist that our knowledge of God's nature 
is 2, fragmentary affair. 

If one conviction more than another possess the 
thoughtful student of nature to-day, it is this of the 
finiteness, the incompleteness of his knowledge. What 
he has been wont to call the necessities of nature have 
turned out repeatedl3^ to mean nothing more than the 
temporary limits of his experimentation. I read to 
students in logic the unqualified statement of one of 
the highest scientific authorities, that no one is justi- 
fied in saying the dead can Jiot be raised to life, water 

153 



can not be turned to wine or that arsenic must cause 
death. 

To say that God is unchangeable, and that all expres- 
sions of Him are equally unchangeable, is not to say 
that our acquaintance with these expressions is unal- 
terable. That acquaintance has been so changed 
within the last half century, that a new world meets 
us on ever}^ hand. If there be a God, and if this be 
His world, it partakes of His infinit3\ Let us beware 
of confounding our pett}^ knowledge of nature with 
nature herself. Is not God omnipotent? Does not 
this, His, world partake of His omnipotence? To pray 
for a reversal of natural law is to pra}^ against God, 
and a mercy it is that such pra3^er can not be granted. 

To pra}' that we may more and more see God every- 
where — more and more realize His holiness, His love, 
and His power — this is to enter into the luxury of 
prayer, its unspeakable blessedness. 



154 



''If it be possible^ let this cup pass from me. 



Most natural petition of every human heart. We 
turn from pain, how miich more from the pain that 
seems destructive. To drink of the cup seems neces- 
sary, yet to drink seems death. We come before our 
Heavenly Father and plead that the cup may pass. As 
we pray we know that there may be a far better, 
diviner, more glorious thing for us than the passing 
of the cup. How sweet, how inexpressibly precious 
that faith which, seeing God, the Loving Father, in 
everything , sees Him also in the cnp. For that cup to 
pass is for God to pass. How transcendent the glory 
of that faith which can draw near to God in the dark- 
ness, the darkness of inexorable law, saying, Thou, oh 
God, art law, all, therefore, is well. 

"If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." I 
will talk with Thee, oh my Father, as friend talketh 
with friend; I will plead with Thee, for my heart is 
sore distressed. Call me by name. Heavenly Father, 
that I may be sure Thou knowest me, even me, and not 
another. Behold, how bitter this cup is for me. I 
have drank of the cup daily ; how long, how long ! 
I have no hope, dear Father. The days are fetters, and 
the nights without rest. Help me! Take away the 
cup! 

155 



Father, what is this that comes upon me ? Is it Thy 
spirit? I am pressed about as never before. Art 
Thou touching me? Art Thou here in the darkness? 
I thought I was alone. Am I Thy child? The 
fetters, are they Thy arms? Art Thou holding me by 
Thy law? Oh God, are all things working together 
for me — for me, that I may come to the full stature of 
my being? Hast Thou seen me all these years that I 
have lain upon my couch of pain? Didst Thou hear 
me when I cursed the da}- wherein I w^as born and 
begged for death? 

Merciful Father, w^hat would have become of me had 
I died in those times of despair. And the cup is 
thine — given to me because Thou lovest me and 
knowest what the end shall be. 

I am tired, dear Father, let me rest on Thee. How^ 
tender the grass on which I lie — is it — is it Thy 
bosom? How protecting the trees above? How pure 
and sw^eet the wide sky — are they Thee? And the 
cup — the bitter, bitter cup, is it also Thee? Do I 
drink life in death? 

Father, I thank Thee for this hour of prayer. 
Never do I so enter into the meaning of life as when 
I talk with Thee. Hold fast the world. Hold fast 
the infinite universe, oh God, and let me find Thee in 
it more and more without end. 



156 









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